1. Scott Clark, team player

At 10:15 p.m. on May 1, the day Time Warner kept ABC programming off its cable systems, Scott Clark, the burly, gray-haired sports anchor for Eyewitness News , swaggered up to WABC headquarters at West 66th Street and Columbus Avenue. He was swinging his umbrella and puffing on a short cigar.

What did he make of the situation?

"We've not been told to expect anything," he said, removing the cigar from his mouth. "It hasn't deterred our jobs. It hasn't affected our jobs. We are going about our jobs. There are more questions than answers. It's out of our hands. We're merely workers here."

With that he tapped The Observer 's thigh with the end of his umbrella, smiled and strolled into the WABC building, as though he were wearing a towel around his waist.

2. Bill Ritter, philosopher

Later, Bill Ritter, the tall, dark, handsome news man who does double duty as a corespondent for 20/20 and as an anchor for the 11 o'clock local news, reflected on the experience of delivering the news to an audience that cannot see or hear you.

"It's weird," he said. "It's that whole tree-falls-in-the-woods concept. But more along the lines of, If we do a great story, and nobody watches it, is it still a great story? I mean, objectively, sure. And are my bosses watching?"

He said that the phones hadn't been ringing any more or less frequently in the studio that night.

"I worked on Good Morning America Sunday ," he said "We could have been yelling and screaming into the camera and all of four people might have heard us. I've worked the weekend long enough to know that it doesn't really matter. I've worked the lowest and highest audiences, and it effects you a lot more when a lot of people are watching."

The lead story Mr. Ritter read Monday evening concerned–you guessed it–the Time Warner-Disney dispute itself, which he wrote.

Later, he compared the situation to "two giant skunks in a great spraying match." "One skunk is bigger," he said. "Time Warner." But this is something he could not say on TV.

3. Sam Champion, trivia maven

"During thunderstorm watches," said five, six and 11 o'clock weatherman Sam Champion, "we've lost cable systems and had blackouts before. But you don't gauge your performance with how many people watch."

Mr. Champion is the blond personification of the AccuWeather meteorology system. He said that the business end of the business is none of his business.

His job, he said, "is to give the people of New York everything they need for the next five days. I like to think that we offer the city's most thorough weather broadcast, and that if this went on for a long time people would be effected."

As far as the night in question–a balmy evening with scattered drizzle–Mr. Champion reported that he "came in at the same time as always. We used the same quality graphics. And gave the same information."

According to Mr. Champion, the news team filled their commercial breaks with the usual "racy" banter. And none of it had to do with the "non-event" of the dispute.

"We were trying to figure out who sang 'Wildfire,'" he said. "Do you know?"

Um, Dan Fogelberg?

"Michael Murphey," he said.

Thank you, Sam.

–Jason Horowitz

The Busy Anarchist

Dennis Burke is a 19-year-old anarchist who lives on the Lower East Side. He carries around a little black appointment book full of radical events and meetings he doesn't have to attend, because he is philosophically opposed to having to do events and meetings. But usually he feels like showing up at these things, because he is a full-time anarchist and doesn't have anywhere else he has to be. Most of his friends have similar schedules.

On a recent Saturday night Mr. Burke was in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn at a May Day organizational meeting. His fellow radicals milled around, trying to get organized. "Let's circle up, folks," a number of them kept saying.

Mr. Burke was asked whether he could spare a few minutes. "I think we're going to circle up now," he said. "But I can talk to you for a while."

Mr. Burke, a native of South Boston, is tall and skinny with gaunt face and slate colored eyes. He wore green army pants cut off below the knees, sneakers, a gray hooded sweatshirt and a backwards Boston Red Sox cap. He spoke in a barely audible monotone.

"Last night, we walked across the Williamsburg Bridge to a loft party," he said. "There were videos playing there of actions I've been in. It had a video of the night there was a police riot at Esperanza, where a friend of mine had two ribs broken and another friend had a dislocated jaw."

He moved to New York last fall after graduating from high school. Since then, he has had many confrontations with the police. It's been a busy few months. He has protested the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, animal testing, police brutality, the Amadou Diallo decision, the city's attempts to evict community gardens, the imprisonment of Leonard Peltier and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's rule against assembling in front of City Hall. Sewn on to his sweatshirt is a patch depicting a policeman saying, "I'm going to kick your ass and get away with it."

He has been arrested twice by the New York Police Department: once on Nov. 26 during a demonstration of a group called Reclaim the Streets, and once last winter when he chained his neck to a fence at a community garden the city was trying to bulldoze.

During the first incident, Mr. Burke was charged with assaulting a police officer. "It was because I went limp and the arresting officer who I didn't see at the scene hurt her wrist carrying me," he explained.

Mr. Burke spent three nights at Rikers Island and has a trial coming up. Since October Mr. Burke has worked two jobs for money; one lasted two hours and the other lasted two days. The first was as a plumbers assistant, which Mr. Burke liked pretty well, but it was a small job. The second was at a "bio-dynamic organic market."

The lack of steady employment, however, isn't really a problem because Mr. Burke does not have much use for money. He does not pay rent, buy clothes or compact discs, eat in restaurants, drink alcohol, do drugs or smoke. He eats a lot of vegetable soup, pudding and rice and beans at Food Not Bombs, a mobile soup kitchen where he cooks and serves.

"One thing I try not to do is use money or buy anything," said Mr. Burke. "I've only bought seven different items since mid-January. Today I bought a bike tire and bike inner tube for $13. Before I bought two other bike inner tubes, a bike patch kit, and a lock and chain."

That's it? "I was going to buy a flashlight but changed my mind."

I asked Mr. Burke, who lives in squatted buildings on the Lower East Side, what he hopes to be doing in 10 years. "I'm not looking that far ahead," he said. "Some things I don't plan on doing are getting a regular job, paying taxes and paying rent. I hope to never pay rent."

It was time for Mr. Burke to circle up with his colleagues and plan some May Day events: a march for amnesty for undocumented workers, a squatters gathering in Tompkins Square Park, a teach-in on the Vietnam War with Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman, and a Reclaim the Streets meeting.

Then what?

"I don't know," Mr. Burke said. "It probably depends on the police."

– J. K. Dineen

The pair of South Africans-turned-Australians (who are now trying to turn into Manhattanites) were walking uptown through Times Square. They were looking for the Whiskey Bar in the Paramount Hotel, on West 46th Street. Disoriented, the two took out their Palm Pilots and called up maps of Manhattan to get their bearings.

"It's that way," Mr. Berman said, pointing west.

Sure enough, thanks to their gadgets, the men found the place, got a table, ordered martinis and started trying to explain Bar Code, their new nightspot in the Bertelsmann Building in Times Square.

Bar Code, which is opening on May 9, is a bar full of games-video games, carnival games, Daytona 500 race-car simulations, pinball. It's a sort of liquor-licensed romper room for adults who are more comfortable shooting down spaceships than striking up conversation with other humans-adults for whom a good night out is still a roll of quarters. To Mr. Berman and Mr. Schreiber, the new night crawler is at heart a distractible prepubescent, incapable of feeling comfortable around strangers without the help of an electronic interlocutor. So they have opened what is essentially a giant Game Boy with booze, to lure the introverts of the Sega generation out of their lairs.

"You walk into Bar Code, grab one of our high-energy cocktails and on your own move off and start playing some of the games," Mr. Berman explained in his mongrel colonial accent, as he sipped his martini. "It's a total ice-breaker. The focus isn't on standing around and having to engage in conversation. It's a real easy place to get comfortable."

Mr. Berman, 40, is chief executive of the Melbourne-based company Entertainment Development Group, owner of about a dozen 24-hour nightclubs and high-tech circuses in Australia and Asia. In recent weeks, Mr. Berman's Australian cohorts have been crawling all over Times Square-handing out Pez dispensers, holding tryouts for "millennial freaks," installing "cyber coasters" and fiberglass rockets-in an effort to promote this strange new place they've installed in Times Square.

Meanwhile, visiting Aussies have cluttered Mr. Berman's West 42nd Street offices with duffel bags and suitcases. The place is full of guys with bloodshot eyes just in from down under. They are Mr. Berman's evangelists, here in an effort to convince New Yorkers that we're as deprived of entertainment as the good citizens of Melbourne.

Then there's the South African contingent. Mr. Berman is being escorted around town by a crew from his hometown of Johannesburg. Colin Cowie, a "party-planner to the stars," who produced weddings for Don Henley, Kenny G. and Kelsey Grammer, has been introducing him to lawyers and bankers. And Colin Finkelstein, who holds the dubious honor of being chief financial officer at Golden Books, is showing him the "latest and greatest" restaurants. "It's fantastic," Mr. Berman said of his Manhattan tour.

An ex-punk rocker (he played bass for a band called The Young, Dumb, and Violent), Mr. Berman has shoulder-length brown hair, a square jaw and a scary tan. He rents an apartment at the Grand Millennium at 1965 Broadway, and commutes regularly between Australia and New York, picking his two kids up at school in Melbourne one weekend every month. With round-the-clock nightspots in many time zones, Mr. Berman often sits at odd hours in front of his computer watching the security cameras and cash registers at his Australian venues.

At the Whiskey, he was wearing black boots, black pants and a black silk shirt. He kept flipping his hair back as he tried to describe the E.D.G. philosophy: "It's a very simple statement: good games never go out of fashion. Pool, pinball, certain redemption games, certain video games, the classics, they're here forever," Mr. Berman said. "I was reading an article in GQ that talked about the end of pinball. Forget about it. Pinball will be around forever."

"It's a good time to invest in pinball machines," added Mr. Schreiber, who described himself as a "techno games geek."

"The more people play games in any fashion-at home on PlayStation or on the Internet, on a plane on the way to Asia, at the airport, at a bar-regardless, the more they will play games," said Mr. Berman. "If you have a hamburger, you don't feel like another one. You watch a movie, you watch another one. You play a game, you play another one. The appetite for entertainment is insatiable."

Somehow, after spending a little time in New York, Mr. Berman has come to the conclusion that there is nothing to do in Times Square.

"Here you have one of the biggest tourist districts in the world-something like 26-million people coming a year-and there's really nothing to do, is there?" Mr. Berman asked. "Where is all the entertainment?"

Mr. Berman's company has 25,000-square-feet of space on three floors of the Bertelsmann Building. The ground floor is occupied by the 3,000-square-foot company store where they will hawk Bar Code halter-tops and baseball caps. From there, an escalator will bring you past a massive fiberglass rocket ship to the Galactic Circus, a sort of all-ages high-tech games parlor filled with circus performers, jugglers and "scary mimes." Bar Code is on the third floor. Between the two top floors there are 220 electronic games.

Attendants wander around organizing competitions among game participants. Illuminated stars and moons and circus tents hang from the ceiling. The emphasis is on redemption centers-those prize booths where you trade winning tickets for feathered roach clips or Peter Frampton mirrors. Only at Galactic Circus, you can win real stuff: money and electronics.

Those of legal age can further ascend to Bar Code, the 24-hour nightclub offering much of the same fare as Galactic Circus, but also serving High Energy Boost cocktails-fruity cocktails, basically.

With a recent infusion of $20 million from the South African venture capital company Kersaf, they are looking to bring their ideas to Orlando, Fla., Chicago, Las Vegas and Atlanta. They are hoping to take the company public a year or so from now. Asked to say more about their initial public offering, "We could tell you, but we'd have to kill you, mate," Mr. Berman said. He and Mr. Shreiber snickered at that one.

Mr. Berman grew up in Johannesburg, where his father sold cars and his mother sold real estate. After college, Mr. Berman took a job with Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, where one of his clients was Warner Brothers. Eventually he joined Warner Brothers home-video division, and became vice president of operations for Home Video Australia within a few years. By the age of 27, he had been transferred to Los Angeles and charged with setting up video stores throughout the world.

While in Los Angeles, Mr. Berman married an Australian woman and the couple relocated to Melbourne, where he went into business with his father-in-law, an Australian shopping-center developer. They negotiated the rights for Blockbuster Australia and New Zealand.

"I just hated working in a family business," he said. "It was a terrible situation in that I had moved to a foreign country, given up what could only be classified as a fast track career at Warner Brothers, and found myself in a family business I didn't want to be in. That put all sorts of strain on the marriage."

After getting divorced, Mr. Berman sold his interest in Blockbuster ("That is where I would've made my money," he said, regretfully) and started looking around for a new project. Then he got together with his current posse, Mr. Schreiber, an heir to the South African Bic lighter franchise, and Joe Gersh, an Australian lawyer, and they developed their theories about games. Now they are sharing them with New York.

The other night, Mr. Berman and Mr. Schreiber finished their martinis and stepped outside the Whiskey. Mr. Berman checked his Breitling watch, which told the time in both Melbourne and Times Square, where it was just a little after 9 p.m.-time to get back to work putting the finishing touches on Bar Code.

But before heading toward the bright lights of Broadway, Mr. Berman had one more quibble with the way we do things in New York: "You'd think that in the city that never sleeps you could have a 24-hour liquor license."

But if they are not-and such wise men can't all be wrong, can they?-Mr. Levin could turn out to be a latter-day Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate in a post-industrial world.

Mr. Levin, the 49-year-old founder and chief executive of E-steel Corporation, is trying to transform the $700 billion global steel industry into one of the world's largest electronic business-to-business marketplaces. In 1998, he established his on-line exchange for buyers and sellers of steel, and he plans to take it public later this year. He stands to become a very wealthy and significant man.

Steel, that vintage source of great American wealth, is not very sexy these days, but B2B (that's new economese for business-to-business) is. The stock market likes on-line businesses that cater to other businesses (as opposed to consumers). In fusing the two, Mr. Levin has begun making a name for himself in the grand tradition of the stealth New York businessman-by aspiring to glamour in an unglamorous line.

This would-be king of steel works in a drab, makeshift office near Madison Square Garden, with nothing on the walls and a rather bland view of a Holiday Inn. On a recent Friday evening, he sat there behind a glass-topped desk, dressed in a striped open-collared shirt, tan wide-waled cords, Docksides and wool socks, and told his fund-raising tale-of how a steel industry veteran convinced some fancy venture capitalists to invest over $100 million in his dot-com business.

Last spring, Bessemer Ventures approached E-steel to discuss investment possibilities. Mr. Levin gave his E-steel spiel and asked the money men if they had any questions. "They said, 'No questions, we're going to be your venture capital lender.' So that was that," recalled Mr. Levin. Then he talked to executives at Kleiner Perkins in Silicon Valley and Greylock in Boston. They signed on right away.

"I became a mini-legend," he said. "Not only did I get Kleiner Perkins to invest in us based on my presentation, I made only three presentations and got three investors. Three up, three down. That is a record, especially of the caliber we're talking about. I think we have three of the best venture capital firms in the world."

E-steel is basically a marketplace for companies looking to buy and sell steel: hot rolled, cold rolled, coated, plate, tin mill, rebar, scrap, pipe, whatever. It operates as an exchange. Participating companies log on, search for suppliers and start negotiating.

Since the E-steel exchange opened in September, 428 fabricators, 1,591 companies, 91 steel mills and 336 service centers (in 69 countries) have gone to www.e-steel.com to buy or sell steel. Mr. Levin is hoping that by 2005 E-steel will be handling 30 percent of the industry's transactions. Right now it has a sliver of that. The company charges between 0.3 percent and 1 percent of the value of each transaction done over the exchange. (The company's main competitor, Pittsburgh-based Metalsite, is mostly owned by Weirton Steel Corporation and charges 1 to 2 percent.)

Thirty percent of $700 billion is $210 billion. Skim a percent or so off of that and you've got a pretty good business. An old economy business: There's profit in it.

Mr. Levin lives in a downtown loft with his wife, who is French, and three children. They go up to their Dutchess County farm when time permits. He says he likes "dangerous activities" and prides himself on having skied runs in the Chugach Mountains in Alaska that "no human had ever done." He is an offshore sailor and raced in the Admiral's Cup in a Doug Peterson-designed 43-foot sloop. He said he is also a former dirt bike racer, expert rock climber and mountaineer. He doesn't get out much these days, but these credentials are clearly important to him. He has managed to reconcile his daredeviltry with his entrepreneurial undertaking. "The point is that people who do like this sort of thing tend to be happier when they are living without a safety net," said Mr. Levin. "When you're sailing into a storm offshore in a boat, everybody has to do their job correctly or everybody is in trouble."

Mr. Levin grew up in Westchester County. He said he doesn't really keep in touch with his family. "I didn't grow up exactly on my own here, but most of my life I created myself," he said. While still in high school, he took a summer job in London with Titan Industrial Corporation, a steel company. There he met Titan executive Walter Marias, who he recalls as a "James Bond leading man" type who carted him out to a country house, took him shooting and introduced him to rich friends' daughters. "I remember spending one week's salary on a Coca-Cola at Annabelle's-the nightclub in London," he said. "I came to think of the steel industry as a very glamorous place."

He returned to the States, attended the University of Wisconsin and Harvard business school, then went back to work for Titan. But soon he was soon sent to Africa as a tin plate salesman to "learn humility." He worked in Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and later all over Asia and Europe. He advanced to steel trader to vice president to president and finally bought the company in 1994. He still owns Titan, although he is no longer involved in its operation.

For over three decades, Mr. Levin has worked in nearly every aspect of the steel industry-global, domestic, manufacturing, distribution, trading-yet he has often found the industry a little too tame. "I always asked myself why the industry isn't as dynamic as it might be," he said. He dreamed of ways to improve "the foggy and inefficient world of relationships and faxes and messages not returned and people writing orders on cocktail napkins."

Finally, in the spring of 1998, Mr. Levin formed E-steel and began to assemble a team and define the technology that would allow steel to be bought and sold in a secure electronic marketplace. Then he raised the venture capital-three up, three down-which in turn begat more investment, including a partnership, announced on Feb. 24, with U.S. Steel Group.

Mr. Levin is especially fond of the "poetic" notion that the Bessemer Ventures money descends from America's great steel tycoon, Andrew Carnegie. (Sir Henry Bessemer invented the furnace for the mass production of steel, the device Carnegie and his partners, including Bessemer founder Henry Phipps, relied on to build their fortunes.) "The old steel industry made the money, created the pool of investment funds that went into E-steel and is now going create a new way for the steel industry to move forward," he said. "There is a certain elegance to it."

Among the 100 employees in the New York office (E-steel also has small offices in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Singapore and Brussels) Mr. Levin figured he has 300 years of steel industry experience. While Mr. Levin said the company will go public this year, he wouldn't say when. He said he doesn't know what the company will be valued at, but said that other people have estimated its worth somewhere around $600 million. And based on the trend of public offerings of B2B companies-which he calculates at "six to 10 times the late-stage private financial"-Mr. Levin and other stock holders could be very rich, very soon.

"I'm not predicting valuation and I'm not saying when we're going to have an I.P.O. I'm saying that based on other people's experience you get that type of step up," he said. " You figure it out. Even reporters have calculators."

"We're a very, very strong company with a very strong mission in a $700 million marketplace with the absolute best list of clients of any B2B," he went on. "What we're doing is really big, because the steel industry around the world is deciding there's another way to do business."

It was early on a Friday evening, and Mr. Levin was due at his son's birthday party. He had been working seven days a week for months. "I'm almost out of hyperbole," he said-but he wasn't quite out of it yet. "This is as important as giving up the horse-drawn carriage and jumping into a Model T," he said, "or saying we don't need scribes copying onto parchment-we have the printing press."

He tried to summon his assistant. "Hello?" he called out. "Hello?" The assistant appeared, and he gave her some things to do.