Daily News from New York, New York • 25

cn $41 $28.87 $72.37 -15A $31.75 44 $97.87 i-i i i Aim, 1 1 This is the first in an occasional series of Daily News interviews with the leaders and personalities behind the hottest companies in the media business. By GEORGE MANNES Daily News Business Writer With all the attention on Microsoft's online magazine, Slate, Internet zines in New York sometimes get short shrift. One of the most respected local maga-: zines created for the Internet is Feed, founded nearly two years ago by two freelance writers, Stefanie Syman and i Steven Johnson. Feed (http:www.feedmtig.com) is an eclectic mix of commentaries about culture in general and the Internet in particular. In its current issue, you can read advice about how to avoid information overload, or "data smog." You can listen to a selection of 50 of the best 10-second sound bites of popular music.

And you can laugh at a feature in which the author commissions a focus group so he can learn how to market himself to women, the same way advertisers gather groups of consumers to come up with ways to sell bars of soap. DN: Microsoft is spending hundreds of millions on its online efforts. How much have you put into Feed? Johnson: We were funded initially by private investors, most of whom are relatives of mine. Now we have two outside private investors. Our total capitalization is pretty significantly less than a half-million.

DN: Are you breaking even? Johnson: We're getting very close to that We're approaching break-even. Our expectation is we'll be profitable by this summer. Syman: People are treating Web content developers like technology companies we should be able to make $50 million in 18 months. But content doesn't work that way. Print magazines give themselves five years to break even.

People are expecting Web publications to break even in six months or REAL ESTATE: Tit THE Kodak's sharper, cheaper image Eastman Kodak today will introduce a digital camera for under $1,000 that produces unusually sharp photographs for the price, an advance that could give an important boost to the filmless gizmos. The price of Kodak's DC120 Zoom Digital camera wasn't seen by industry analysts as low enough to attract casual photographers, who are used to paying under $300 for film-based cameras that take snapshots good enough for the family album. But Kodak's new camera could attract hobbyists and professionals in real estate, insurance and other businesses who require images to be quickly sent. Digital cameras look like other point-and-shoot cameras, but instead of relying on film to record the picture, they use a photosensitive chip called a charged-coupled device, or CCD. It resolves an image into dots, or pixels, which the camera stores in its memory as digital bits.

From there, the images can be downloaded straight to a computer to be sent across the Internet or printed out on a high-quality computer printer. Another benefit is that consumers save film-processing costs. Write-offs on rise Credit card losses increased in February, though at a slower pace than in January, according to Standard Poor's Rating Service. U.S. issuers wrote off 6.6 of all credit card loans in February, up from 6.5 in January, based on a review of $220 billion in credit-card loans that back publicly traded bonds.

Issuers took losses on 6.1 of loans in December. Tool orders up sharply Orders for American-made machine tools surged in February compared with a year earlier and reflected strong demand from domestic manufacturers, said a monthly trade report released yesterday. It estimated domestic orders totaled $562 million, up 22 from $461 million in February 1996. For the first two months of the year, it estimated orders totaled $1.15 billion, up 13 from the year earlier. The report was compiled by a joint venture of the Association for Manufacturing Technology and the American Machine Tool Distributors' Association.

The Northeast was up 20.3. Extra miles at pump Gasoline pump prices dipped about a third of a penny over the past three weeks but bigger declines could be coming, an industry analyst said. The average retail price of gasoline, counting all grades and taxes, was about $1.28 a gallon, according to the Lundberg Survey of 10,000 stations nationwide. That was down three-tenths of a cent from the March 21 survey and about 4 cents a gallon from the same period last year. Trilby Lundberg said.

It was the first time this year that the overall price fell below last year's, she added. Lower crude oil prices are being passed on to consumers, and "the declines could reaccelerate soon" if current crude prices hold, Lundberg said. More Stocks The Daily News is now offering free, up-to-the-minute stock quotes and information on its Web site. It includes earnings, revenues and high-low pricing details for each issue. Check out the site at http: www.mostnewyork.com.

EVY MAGES DAILY NEWS and Steven Johnson co-founded Feed be profitable by summer. Feed reader and a Slate reader are mutually exclusive if you're a Slate reader, you can't be a Feed reader. DN: Is Feed going to change in the near future? Johnson: We'll be adding a daily column, probably in early May. Right now, we add about three articles a week to the site. The sites that I know are updated every day, I compulsively visit DN: How will your readership change? Johnson: People will grow more and more comfortable with printing out pieces and reading them off-line and returning to the site for the multi-media stuff or the conversation or the hypertext That's actually the way I sometimes read Feed.

at edifice complex But sources said Bankers Trust will be taking the space in 4 World Trade Center, a nine-story building next to the twin towers. The deal is expected to be concluded within a few months. Alan Hanson, a Bankers Trust spokesman, confirmed that the firm is expanding. "Any space we would be looking for would be tied to our continued expansion," he said. Sources said the expansion was planned even before the deal with Alex.

Brown, which will be keeping most of its operations in Baltimore. Vacancies have been growing at the World Trade Center, partly because of problems in Japan's economy. The complex has been popular with Japanese tenants, but in recent years problems at home have forced 17 of them to shut their WTC doors. Also, many U.S. tenants don't like dealing with the Port Authority bureaucracy that runs the World Trade Center.

Since the bombing, tenants have found the heightened security at the complex to be a hassle. into OTC THEIR SPIN ON THE WEB: Stefanie Syman magazine on the Internet. They expect it will one year, which is absurd. DN: Many Internet content companies are going bust. How do you avoid that pitfall? Johnson: The best way is to start as lean as possible.

We ran the company with the two of us for the first year. We ran it out of our separate apartments. We had three employes until late last fall, when we added a fourth. We also have two part-time employes. DN: Now, Slate is your competition.

But they also advertise on your site. What's going on? Syman: Their money looks like everyone else's money. It's green. The more successful publications there are on the Web, the better things are for all of us. We don't feel that a profits were soaring into the stratosphere.

But lately that's begun to change as banks and investment banks have expanded. Bankers Trust, which has $115 billion in assets, has been one of the fastest-growing institutions. The firm's global staff has swelled to 15,000 from 13,800 in two years, even as it has been struggling with a financial scandal that erupted in the early 1990s. Bankers Trust's growth is part of its strategy to become both an investment bank, which underwrites stocks and bonds, and a commercial bank. In May, the firm acquired Wolfen-sohn a mergers and acquisitions boutique.

Last week, Bankers Trust announced that it was buying Alex. Brown, a Baltimore stock brokerage, for $1.64 billion one of the largest purchases ever of a securities firm by a U.S. bank. Bankers Trust and Port Authority officials would not comment on the World Trade Center tenancy deal. ISO $45M, 15-year deal seen bolstering esteem By PETER GRANT Dairy News Business Writer Global finance giant Bankers Trust is about to give the World Trade Center a much-needed boost The expanding bank, which stunned Wall Street last week by acquiring brokerage firm Alex.

Brown is set to lease more than 150,000 square feet in the struggling complex. The 15-year deal has a value of more than $45 million. The news couldn't come at a better time for the World Trade Center, which has been losing tenants steadily since the terrorist bombing in February 1993. The complex is saddled with about 2 million square feet of vacant space roughly the equivalent of two Chrysler Buildings just as the Port Authority is about to put it on the block. The Bankers Trust deal also is a sign of health in the city's financial serv-: ices industry, one of its largest employers.

For most of the 1990s, banks and Wall Street firms have added few new employes and new space, even as their i HMIIinilllMHIU!.