August 2024

Adrienne Roark leads all newsgathering for CBS News and Stations. In this role, she manages teams in the field and across all newsrooms, including correspondents, assignment desks, bureaus, booking teams, standards and practices, the Super Desk and CBS News Radio.

Roark spearheads developing new newsgathering processes while managing all editorial aspects at CBS News. Additionally, Roark focuses on integrating CBS News and Stations local, national and global teams. In addition to having oversight of national newsgathering and editorial teams, Roark leads the CBS Local News Innovation Lab – the centers of excellence she has built around data journalism, weather and beats/units – as well as WCBS and WLNY in New York and WBZ and WSBK in Boston.

In Roark’s previous role as president of Content Development and Integration of CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures, she brought together teams across CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures to create content that grows audience reach and impact, industry leadership and organizational effectiveness. She also oversaw CBS-owned stations in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Pittsburgh and Baltimore, a responsibility she assumed when becoming president of CBS Stations in August 2021.

As president, Roark led the creation and launch of the “Newsroom of the Future” CBS News Detroit, a local news organization built from the ground up with a streaming-first mentality, at WWJ-TV in January 2023. She also led the CBS Local News Innovation Lab, where CBS News and Stations employees experiment with next-generation storytelling and test new products, workflows and production models.

Roark is a proponent of data journalism. She created the data journalism initiative, hired the executive in charge and put together the award-winning team that works across CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures. Understanding the necessity to meet the audiences’ viewership needs, Roark used research-backed data to strategically create and launch multiple “centers of excellence” beats that focus on audiences’ interests: consumer/money watch, transportation, immigration, medical, weather and crime. These teams collaborate with the Innovation Lab and the data journalism team and work across CBS News and Stations, delivering best-in-class reporting.

For her efforts, Roark, a three-time regional Emmy Award winner and recipient of six regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, was named a 2024 Wonder Women of New York by Multichannel News.

She began her career at CBS. After graduating from The Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in communications, she took a position at WBNS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Columbus. She moved to Cleveland, Miami, Orlando and Dallas-Fort Worth stations before becoming CBS affiliate KOIN-TV’s general manager in 2014. She served as general manager of Fox affiliate KPTV-TV and MyNetwork station KPDX-TV from 2016 until rejoining CBS in 2021.

Roark is on the National Advisory Board of Poynter, the Broadcasters Foundation of America’s Board of Directors, and the Carole Kneeland Project Board of Directors. She has long been active in community organizations – she served as the board chair of the Boys and Girls Club of Portland and has held board positions with Sport Oregon, Veterans’ Legacies, the Dougy Center and the Oregon Association of Broadcasters.

Roark and her husband, Dave, are the proud parents of two sons, Alex and Stephen.