If you've spent any time on our Web site (honoluluadver tiser.com) lately, then you've noticed some subtle but important changes.

First and foremost, our breaking-news posts have grown substantially from a handful per day to 15 or 20 on weekdays and four or five on weekends. In June, we produced about 450 news updates that attracted 800,000 page views, or about 7 percent of our total for the month. A page view, as many of you know, is someone clicking on a story. For us, it's a measuring tool that allows us to track the stories that interest our readers. That's harder to do in the print version of The Advertiser unless someone is calling up or e-mailing about a specific article.

Each day, we generate a report that shows the most popular breaking stories from that day and the previous day. Sometimes readers' choices mesh perfectly with what we've chosen for the front page. But sometimes readers have found something of interest that we've buried deep in the paper. It doesn't always change the way we feel about a story's importance — we know that almost any kind of crime story, no matter how small, will rise to the top — but it helps to know what readers are thinking.

The changes we've made were not lost on an Associated Press staffer I met recently. "You've turned into a wire service," he said.

Since he comes from a news service that churns out thousands of high-quality stories a day, I took it as a compliment.

At a time when there are so many outlets for news, people are used to getting information when and where they want it. But there are fewer ways to get instant local news, and that's why we are adding much more to our Web site.

Thursday's minor earthquake that shook the state didn't generate a tsunami. Still, our call for readers to share their experiences drew more than 100 posted comments in the hours that followed the quake.

Besides breaking news, we are including more video than ever, some of it staff produced and some of it from outside sources.

The Kaua'i dam disaster and the Waikiki sewage spill helped make March 2006 a record month for online traffic since we started tracking it. The tally for the month was 17 million page views and 1.48 million unique visitors. A page view is recorded with each click on a story, but a unique visitor is traced to a single IP address, given by an Internet service provider. In some ways it can be a truer measure of our online audience because it discounts those who might repeatedly click on a single story.

What made March such a record-breaking month was simply a lot of news. A single story on the Kaua'i dam disaster (March 14) accounted for the fourth-highest number of page views since we began tracking page views. On that one day, we saw more than 102,900 page views on our main breaking story, aided by links from other sites such as the Drudge Report, Yahoo! and Google. About two weeks later, our March 29 story on the Ala Wai sewage spill generated 101,100 page views, the fifth-highest hit count for a story in a single day.

Our Tantalus shooting coverage was a textbook example of how our business is changing, and how we cannot hold our stories for the next day's print edition. The day after the shootings, a Friday, we posted a breaking story on the suspect being captured, another that identified the victims, a third on the suspect's invasion of another couple's home and several others. Combined page views for all the stories was 128,000, showing intense reader interest.

By Friday night, we had put almost everything we had online. We had to figure out a different approach to Saturday's paper. We secured an exclusive print interview with the daughter of the couple that had been killed, and her story was heartbreaking. We used that as the lead story in the paper the following day.

But some readers can't live on breaking news alone, so there are photo galleries, polls, videos and blogs to offer.

In the newspaper, we're limited by the space we have to display photos, so we choose one or two of our best. Rather than letting the rest go to waste, we post them online, where space is not a problem. Our "History of Today" photos attract roughly 10,000 views a day. The combined Miss Aloha Hula kahiko and 'auana galleries generated more than 27,000 page views, and the photo gallery of the Kaloko dam disaster drew 21,000 page views.

When we're not providing the photos for the galleries, our readers are sending them in for features such as "Pictures of Paradise," "Pet Project" and "Class of 2006." In June, we received some 400 photos from readers. And just last week, we unveiled five blogs on different interest topics. We'll have some substantive numbers to report in the weeks to come.

The dynamics of the Internet are quickly changing how we present the news we gather each day. Long gone are the days when we could fret only about what the newspaper would look like the next day. We have to get the story right, but we also need to get it quickly to a growing online audience that is not satisfied to wait for news when it hits the driveway.