Growing up in Ohio, Adrienne Roark learned about work ethic from her mom, who ran her own personal advertising business, and her dad, who taught high school English but also operated his own roofing and insulating business in the summer, taking young Adrienne along to help. She also pitched in with cleaning up and fixing the family’s various rental properties.
“As a kid, I would complain, but I find that to be invaluable now,” said Roark, who after two years as president, CBS Stations, was named last fall as president, content development and integration, CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures. She’s now responsible for bringing together the teams across these businesses to create and share content while continuing to oversee CBS-owned stations in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. “I have no problem rolling up my sleeves and doing pretty much anything. Plus, it’s really handy to be able to fix stuff.”
She found her calling all on her own. “I knew that journalism was somewhere in my future when I was a young kid for two reasons: I love to write and I’m incredibly nosy,” she said. “I would call up the aunts and the uncles and the cousins and just dig up stuff about our family and create this little newsletter by hand and then send copies to my family. My mom would say, ‘You need to stop digging up family secrets and sharing them with everybody.’ ”
I wanted to be that person helping to shape what we’re doing and protecting and guiding the journalism.”
Adrienne Roark
Roark, a three-time regional Emmy Award winner, broadened her view beyond her family, taking journalism courses at Ohio State University and then getting an internship at WBNS Columbus. “The first time I walked into that newsroom and saw the energy of these amazingly creative and passionate and somewhat out there people who had no filter, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is where I have to be.’ ”
Roark worked her way up, setting her sights on producing and then on being a news director. “I wanted to be that person helping to shape what we’re doing and protecting and guiding the journalism,” she recalled, adding that’s what led her to move up to general manager. She realized she’d have even more power to protect her journalists and resources there.
“If you stay on a story, you can get a law changed or make people’s lives better, but it’s a big commitment and it can be difficult, especially when economic times get hard,” she said. “You have to stick by it.”
As Roark moved up she moved on, from Columbus to Miami, Dallas and Portland, Oregon — “I covered all the weathers,” she joked — before coming to New York to join CBS in 2021. There, she also built the “Newsroom of the Future” and last year launched CBS News Detroit, a local news organization at WWJ that was built from the ground up with a streaming-first mentality.
Roark also continues to oversee the CBS Local News Innovation Lab in Dallas-Fort Worth, where a curated team experiments with next-generation storytelling, including data journalism, and tests new products, workflows and production models. Most recently, Roark has overseen the CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures investments in data journalism, as well as investigative and environmental reporting, including weather technology and climate coverage, in ways that benefit all of the CBS News, Stations and Media Ventures brands.
Empathetic and Tenacious
“As a leader, she’s very warm and engaging, with immense empathy but also a curiosity, which some people lose because they think they know so much,” said CBS Philadelphia (KYW-WPSG) president and general manager Kelly Frank, who got her first television job 24 years ago when Roark hired her. “She asks questions and seeks other perspectives, but then she’s decisive. That serves her well when she needs to get something done. Then she’s tenacious.”
Wendy McMahon, president and CEO, CBS News and Stations and CBS Media
Ventures, said Roark has established herself as a “game changer.”
“She has the remarkable ability to reimagine content creation and development for the future, building our data journalism and next-generation news-gathering capabilities across CBS News, Stations and CBS Media Ventures,” McMahon said. “Her commitment to distinctive journalism and signature storytelling is unmatched.”
Roark remains passionate about journalism, even tearing up a little when she describes why. “It sounds hokey but even though people think I’m goofy, I love this business,” she said. “The world needs us. And I’ve seen the power of what we do. I really believe my job is to protect journalism so we can change the world for the better one story at a time.”
