News Report

IN a third-floor Flower District walkup with bare wooden floors, plain white walls and an excitable toy poodle named Simon, six guys dressed mainly in T-shirts and jeans sit all day in front of computer screens at desks arranged around the oblong room's perimeter, pecking away at their keyboards and, bit by bit, at the media establishment. The world headquarters of TPM Media is pretty much like any small newsroom, anywhere, except for the shirts. And the dog. And the quiet.

On a wall in his second-floor office at the Boston Globe, just to the left of his desk, Executive Editor Matthew Storin has hung more than a dozen framed pictures, posters, front pages and other mementos from his 34 years as a journalist. One item seems strikingly out of place: A front page from the Globe's longtime archrival, the Boston Herald. The page is dated May 26, 1983.

You probably haven't missed the e-mails from Travel-Ticker amid all the discount e-mail offers clogging your inbox. But the site run by San Francisco-based Hotwire closed down Monday after a seven-year run. "You will no longer receive communications -- including emails -- from Travel-Ticker. Rest assured, all travel bookings already made on Travel-Ticker will still be honored by our travel partners. " That was part of the message sent to subscribers of the discount travel site. Clem Bason, president of Hotwire, explains why the company took the action.

The hardened women of San Luca want you to know a thing or two about their notorious town. Not everyone belongs to the mob, they will tell you. And many who do are driven to it by poverty and neglect. It's a tough sell, no doubt. San Luca, a remote hilltop town in southern Italy, is the ancestral home and principal headquarters of a criminal organization that has emerged as the country's most powerful and dangerous mafia, the 'Ndrangheta.

Rachel Prieur and her brother Ryan were captivated by a radio commercial flooding the airwaves in Dallas. It offered children a shot at stardom — maybe even a part on a Disney show — and all they had to do was show up for an audition. The teenagers begged their parents to take them. Crammed into a hotel ballroom with 200 other children, they took turns reading short monologues in front of a judge. Their father, Bruce Prieur, said a representative for "The," the company that staged the event, told him his children had talent and had qualified to participate in a larger showcase at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, where they would meet top talent scouts.

Merv Grazinski set his Winnebago on cruise control, slid away from the wheel and went back to fix a cup of coffee. You can guess what happened next: The rudderless, driverless Winnebago crashed. Grazinski blamed the manufacturer for not warning against such a maneuver in the owner's manual. He sued and won $1.75 million. His jackpot would seem to erase any doubt that the legal system has lost its mind.

Your editorial deftly put the Pentagon in its place for its recent high-handed attempt to muzzle the press. Now that our Washington warlords have begun commandeering NASA's space-shuttle flights for their own high and mighty purposes, they begin to act as if respecting the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press is beneath them. Their success at controlling the news during the Grenada escapade apparently has gone to their heads. In its mystagogic wisdom, and in the name of national security, the Defense Department defends its imperious action by claiming it'll keep the Soviets from discovering exactly what's aboard the Discovery flight.

I have been a life-long conservative and Republican. I am well aware that not everyone shares my views, and that is as it should be. But I am appalled that the bias of your paper has slipped so very far into reporting ordinary news articles. In two articles in the June 16 edition of The Times, the writers obviously favored a particular "spin" rather than a factual statement. On page 1, an article about the presidential race states, "Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush are locked in a dead heat among California voters . . . ."