During college Benza began writing for "Newsday" and was soon hired full-time as a gossip columnist for that paper and eventually for the "New York Daily News". It was as a gossip columnist that he began appearing on E! Entertainment Television's "The Gossip Show" in the mid-1990s. This led to appearances on talk shows such as "Geraldo", "Hard Copy", "The Montel Williams Show", "The Maury Povich Show", and various other television talk shows. He was later fired from the "New York Daily News" by editor Pete Hamill.