David E. Carlson is now retired. Until 2018 he was executive director of the Center for Media Innovation + Research at the University of Florida and held the Cox/Palm Beach Post chair in new media journalism in the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.
A pioneer in the development of interactive news products, Carlson is internationally recognized as one of the foremost experts in the field. He has more than 25 years of experience in daily newspaper journalism and is an experienced consultant, futurist and speaker at international conferences, meetings and symposia.
He taught graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Florida from 1993 to 2018. His courses were exclusively about online journalism and the future of media until late in his career when he began teaching rock 'n' roll history online. He has lectured at universities in Seoul, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Vladivostok, Tunis, Vienna, London and many other cities.
Before joining UF, Carlson was editor, managing editor, design editor, regional editor, copy editor, reporter and photographer on newspapers with circulations ranging from 7,200 to 430,000. He also was a columnist for national and international magazines, including American Journalism Review, and was a regularly published food and wine critic. He is the author of “The Online Timeline,” the Internet’s most authoritative history of online journalism, featured in the Nieman Reports from Harvard University.
He became involved in online media in 1981. He has given more than 120 presentations on five continents about online journalism and the future of news. He has been called "a pioneer" and the "father of the modern interactive newspaper."
Carlson also is an experienced consultant, having worked with America Online, Apple, Ebay, Microsoft, Prodigy and many others. He served as faculty at the American Press Institute, the Poynter Institute and the University of Florida. He was national president of the Society of Professional Journalists for 2005-06, the first educator ever to hold that post, and was listed in Who's Who in America from 2005 to 2018 and Who's Who in the World from 2008 to present.
He served on the board of directors of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation, the SPJ Foundation, the Florida Society of News Editors and is a past president of the Albuquerque Press Club and SPJ.