Mark Lodato, Assistant Dean, News Director and Professor of Practice

Email: Mark.Lodato@asu.edu
Office: Room 612A
Phone: 602.496.9415

Curriculum Vitae

Courses:
Intermediate Reporting and Writing (broadcast), JMC 315
Television Reporting, JMC 330
Television Newscast Production, JMC 475
Assistant Dean Mark Lodato
Mark Lodato is assistant dean 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 Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

As News Director, Lodato supervises the Cronkite School’s broadcast news operations, including the national award-winning television newscast, Cronkite NewsWatch. The live production airs live four times each week across much of Arizona on Eight KAET-TV, PBS. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students cover top stories in the Phoenix area and across Arizona.

Under Lodato’s leadership, Cronkite School broadcast students have consistently ranked among the nation’s best in premier journalism competitions, including the Hearst College Journalism Awards, the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Awards, and the Broadcast Education Association Festival of Media Arts awards. As a liaison to the television and radio news industry, Lodato has developed partnerships with NBC News, ABC News, FoxSports, Univision, Meredith Corporation, Cox and AZTV and others.

Lodato also oversees the coordination of the Cronkite School’s broadcast skills courses, equipment needs and budget. He also serves as faculty advisor to The Blaze 1330AM, the Cronkite School’s radio station.

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 SUVs, 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, Maryland Newsline was named the best college nightly newscast in America by the Society of Professional Journalists; the newscast would win the award for a second straight time in 2002.

A native of Menlo Park, Calif., 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.