Adrienne Roark To Exit As CBS News President To Join Tegna As Chief Content Officer — Update
UPDATED, with details of Tegna role: Adrienne Roark is exiting her top leadership post at CBS News after just a half-year in the job.
Roark will serve as chief content officer at Tegna, the station group, and will report to CEO Mike Steib.
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“Throughout her impressive career, Adrienne has delivered exceptional journalism at scale while staying deeply committed to local communities,” Steib said in a statement.
Roark’s departure was announced to staffers this morning, a network spokesperson said, confirming a report in the newsletter Breaker. No successor has been named.
Roark was named president of editorial and newsgathering at CBS News and Stations in August, assuming the responsibilities of Ingrid Ciprián-Matthews, who stepped down from her role stop the news division after just a year in the post. She had cited the pending merger between Skydance and Paramount Global, with cuts throughout the company.
Roark’s departure comes amid concern and consternation in the news division over Donald Trump’s attacks on 60 Minutes over the way that the show edited an interview with Kamala Harris. Sources say that discussions have taken place between Paramount Global executives and Trump’s team about settling the president’s $20 billion lawsuit against the network, even though it has been widely viewed by legal observers as frivolous. The Skydance-Paramount Global merger is currently pending regulatory review.
The network has gone through a succession of news division presidents in recent years. Susan Zirinsky served as president from 2019 to 2021, when she returned to producing. She was succeeded by a duo that included Neeraj Khemlani and Wendy McMahon as co-presidents of a combined CBS News and Stations. Khemlani stepped down from that role in 2023. At the time, McMahon was elevated to a sole role as president and CEO of CBS News and Stations, with Ciprián-Matthews taking on the role of president of the news division.
Just a month into the job, Roark joined McMahon in a staff call to address the fallout from CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil’s questioning of author Ta-Nehisi Coates over his book that included a section criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Roark and McMahon said that the interview did not meet the news division’s “editorial standards.” But Shari Redstone, the chair and controlling shareholder of Paramount Global, called it a “mistake” for the network to publicly rebuke Dokoupil.
Despite her short tenure, Roark was well respected among many in the division, having previously served as president of content development and integration. Rumors started to float in the past week about her planned exit, with staffers citing the uncertainty of the landscape following the Skydance acquisition, according to a source.
Roark has had a number of leadership positions at local stations, including general manager roles at KPTV/DPDX and KOIN-TV in Portland and vice president and news director at KTVT-TV and KTXA-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth. At CBS, she also managed the network’s stations in New York and Boston, and earlier oversaw the O&Os in the eastern and central part of the country.
“I’m thrilled to join Tegna and look forward to working with the talented team to continue innovating and delivering high-quality, audience-driven stories for the tens of millions of community members who come to our platforms daily for their local news,” she said in a statement.
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