An online newspaper. The change has been remarkable, according to Beth Laing, the new-media director and Benson's boss. The number of hits on the Web site has risen from several hundred thousand a month to more than 6.5 million.
Hits represent the number of times a Web page is viewed.
He turned 33 in June. The Internet, Benson said, is an entirely new medium, as different from printed text as television is from radio. At the dawn of the television age, he said, many treated the TV like a radio with pictures. News anchors, for example, would read radio scripts before the camera. Web surfers don't want to read longer stories, he said.