At Home on the Web   

When Leah Gentry began tinkering with her family's first computer in 1981, she had no idea how much of a head start she was getting on her career.

Gentry's new role as editorial director of new media for the Los Angeles Times ' online operation, latimes.com , will combine her passion for bits and bytes with the journalism experience of her pre-computer career days as a topic editor for the Orange County Register, and before that as features editor for the Gwinnett Daily News in suburban Atlanta.

In the nascent world of online journalism, Gentry, 37, is a veteran. She was the Register's online editor before she become Internet editor for the Chicago Tribune , where she helped develop the paper's online edition. She also had a brief stint working for the Internet search engine Excite, Inc. before joining the Times.

The transition from print to online came naturally to Gentry, and she is convinced it can and will come easily to other journalists as well. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that new media probably will never supplant the traditional media she grew up on. "Look at the evolution of information media," she says. "The radio didn't kill newspapers. Each [new medium] has stepped up to the plate and offered another way."

Finding the Times' way is a task that will have Gentry overseeing the uploading of about 2,500 news stories to latimes.com each day. The stories eventually are added to an archive that includes every Times story ever published since 1985.

Gentry's digital instincts seem to have paid off, to the point where she no longer feels like a lone settler on the new media frontier. "A lot of people," she says, "thought I was a nut."