Mark Lodato, News Director, Professor of Practice

Mark Lodato is the News Director and a Professor of Practice for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He joined the Cronkite School in August 2006 after working 16 years as television reporter and anchor for television stations in Washington D.C., San Francisco, Phoenix and Ft. Myers, Fla. He also served as News Director at the University of Maryland’s Phillip Merrill College of Journalism.

As News Director, Lodato supervises students participating in the Cronkite School’s national award-winning television newscast, Cronkite NewsWatch. The live production airs three times each week across much of Arizona via Cox Cable. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students cover top stories in the Phoenix area and across Arizona.

Lodato also oversees the coordination of the Cronkite School’s broadcast skills courses, equipment needs and budget.

During his on-air career Lodato received numerous Emmy and Associated Press awards for his live, investigative and feature reporting. As an investigative reporter Lodato’s exclusive reports uncovered the hidden dangers in the roofs of SUV’s, cell phone abuse by the City of Phoenix, and the availability of controlled narcotics to American youths in Mexico.

Other television career highlights include: reporting live outside of the Pentagon on 9/11, covering the Oklahoma City bombing, Arizona Governor Fife Symington’s criminal fraud trial and standing in the eye of Hurricane Andrew as it crossed South Florida.

In December 2000 Lodato was hired to design and lead a new nightly newscast staffed by the University of Maryland’s top journalism students. The effort included opening a new broadcast news bureau in the state capitol of Annapolis. In its first year of eligibility the Society of Professional Journalists named Maryland Newsline the best college nightly newscast in America; an award the newscast would win for a second straight time in 2002.

A native of Menlo Park, California, Lodato graduated in 1989 from the University of Missouri where he received a Bachelor of Journalism degree. Today he lives in Phoenix with his wife and two children.