THE DOW Longtime index components to be removed

Phone, drug and financialservices companies are added to the Dow.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Three longtime components of the Dow Jones industrial average -- AT & amp;T Corp., International Paper and Eastman Kodak -- will be removed from the index of the top 30 industrial stocks, Dow Jones & amp; Co. announced Thursday.
They will be replaced by financial services company American International Group Inc., Baby Bell Verizon Communications and pharmaceuticals maker Pfizer Inc. The change will take place at the start of trading April 8.
"None of these changes was triggered by an event such as an imminent merger, which was the case in the past three instances of changes dating back to the early 1990s," Paul E. Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, said in a prepared statement.
Who selects components
The Journal's top editors evaluate and select the components of the Dow.
Verizon joins another Baby Bell, SBC Communications Inc., which was added to the index in 1999. It also replaces its former parent, AT & amp;T, which had been a consistent Dow component since 1939. International Paper had been included in the index since 1956, while Kodak had been part of the Dow since 1930.
Kodak spokesman Gerard Meuchner downplayed the company's removal from the Dow, even though the struggling film and imaging company has been one of the index's worst-performing stocks.