Janet Coats has a daunting task as the first managing director of the Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology at the University of Florida: helping to mend the deep wounds in our civic life and head off the next pandemic of disinformation. An interdisciplinary group of scholars have been studying these issues: “how media and technology can become more trustworthy, and develop programs for the application of new knowledge and tools and the creation of new policy and law,” as its website frames the mission. Coats has been on the job for less than three months. A former editor at the Sarasota Herald Tribune, more recently director for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and dean of faculty at Poynter, Coats brings more real-world experience and less of an academic background to the role.