As current news director of innovation and with his previous online-based experience at The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Jack Lail pioneered online news in Knoxville, Tenn.

It was in 1994 that Lail began working online and creating Web sites. From an online store that sold University of Tennessee merchandise to advertisement-sponsored news Web sites like knoxnews.com and govols.com, Lail's resume reads like a time line for the digital era.

"The Internet didn't change where I worked but what I did," Lail said. "It has been fun and it has been a lot of variety."

Since beginning at the News-Sentinel in 1984, Lail has done everything from reporting and editing to computer assisted reporting and the online technology. The newspaper industry was changing, and Lail was in the midst of it all.

I did have experience doing computer assisted journalism and I was familiar with computers and database. -Jack Lail, director of news innovation at The Knoxville News Sentinel. "When I got started at my second job in Ashboro, North Carolina we typed our stories on news print and if you messed up you would cut and paste it then give it to the composing room," Lail said. "Photos used filament and were in black and white and video wasn't even a possibility."

Lail said it wasn't even that long ago. He remembers the older women in the composing room coming out to say they knew the person in the story they were composing and that the name was misspelled.

"Then the Internet happened and everything changed: video, audio, multimedia, comments for all stories," Lail said. "We all had to figure it all out by talking because everyone was in the same boat."

Those older ladies, however, can still tell writers that they know the person in the story and that their name is not spelled that way through the comment application, Lail jokes. But like Lail's job titles at the News-Sentinel, the Internet as we know it is has gone through a lot of transitions.

"For a long time, a lot of 'normal people' didn't know it was there," Lail said. "Now it is one of our primary news vehicles."

And as director of innovation, Lail is responsible for the daily editorial content on the Web site and the Web strategy in order to fuel that vehicle to the public.

"You have to do a lot of reading, staying current, just signing up for trials and listening to what other people are doing," Lail said.

But Lail is active online outside of his job at the News-Sentinel. He also has his own Web site where you can read entries from his blog Random Mumblings, access his resume and links to his other social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.