A favorite read on our bookshelf is Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” Her sweeping 1943 novel tells the story of the central character, an intransigent architect, Howard Roark, and his fight for what the author calls “individualism over collectivism.” Over the years, much debate has been had on how much the Roark character is based on real-life architectural icon Frank Lloyd Wright—with whom Rand had a long-standing correspondence. 

Early in the book, the Roark character delivers this crucial line: “I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best possible way to me.” 

We were reminded of the book when we heard of the announcement that Adrienne Roark is leaving her current position as President of Newsgathering and Editorial for CBS News and Stations to become the new Chief Content Officer for Tegna at the end of this month. It struck us not just because of the name shared with the book’s character, but in the initial review, this move seemed a little perplexing. It comes just seven months after she was given the top job at CBS News. Roark arrived at CBS after years in local television newsrooms, leading her to become a general manager for two different stations in Portland, Oregon. She was named President of the CBS Stations group in 2021 by former ABC-owned station head and now current CBS News and Stations CEO Wendy McMahon.

To be sure, CBS News has some significant challenges at this precise moment, and it has likely made it more complicated to close the eight-billion-dollar deal to merge CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, and Skydance Media. As Puck News's Dylan Byers insightfully reported on February 19th, CEO McMahon’s management structure, including "60 Minutes" Executive Producer Bill Owens, had led to confusion amongst the rank and file in the CBS Newsroom. Byers reported that it was determined that Roark wasn’t the right fit “after both sides determined that she wasn’t up to the challenges of the current moment."

Eight days after Roark’s departure was made public, McMahon would name Tom Cibrowski, an experienced network news colleague from her ABC days, as the new President and Executive Editor of CBS News. Notably, the word “Stations” does not appear in Cibrowski’s new title, but “Executive Editor” does. That change would suggest Cibrowski will be much more hands-on in leading the network newsroom on NYC’s West 57th Street.

But back to our focus here, and that is what's ahead of Adrienne Roark when she joins the Tegna C-suite in Tysons, Virginia. Can she be the hand that steadies the wheel aboard a ship that boasts of having “64 Local News brands in 51 markets” on the company’s website? The fact that the company refers to its television stations as “brands” gives us a clue.

Tegna was created over a decade ago in 2014 when the Gannett company—primarily a newspaper concern once led by newspaper maverick Al Neuharth, the creator of “USA Today”—decided to divide itself into two companies. The first would be centered on print-based media and would keep its original name. Then, there was a new television-focused company to be named Tegna. The split was a full circle moment for Gannett, who had first entered the local television business back in 1978 by acquiring Combined Communications Corporation, which, aside from owning The Oakland Tribune and The Cincinnati Enquirer newspapers, also owned a group of seven television stations which would be the first Gannett would own before building their broadcast portfolio by acquiring Texas-based Belo Corporation and its 20 television properties in 2013. 

It might be helpful to remember that until 1984, one company could only own a maximum of seven television stations, along with seven AM and seven FM radio stations, per the Federal Communications Commission’s rules. In ’84, a new limit of owning 12 of each type of broadcast outlet was put in place before being changed again in 1996. Now, the FCC rules determine the maximum number of stations one company can own by calculating the percentage of local and national audience reached by the total of the stations owned. And it is those ownership rules that are once again important to Tegna, as we’ll get to shortly.

But over its life as a separate entity, Tegna has faced its share of challenges. There was a bruising and drawn-out drama with the Biden administration over an announced deal by hedge fund owner Standard General to take Tegna private. The deal ultimately collapsed in 2022 when the FCC put the regulatory review of the agreement into a form of purgatory from which there seemed to be no ultimate resolution. When the deal collapsed, Tegna collected a $136 Million termination fee for its trouble. CEO Dave Lougee would step down to be replaced by new CEO Mike Stieb. Tegna’s longtime VP of News, Ellen Crooke, departed at the beginning of this year. And EVP & COO Lynn Beall is leaving in a few months. One might speculate that those two departures created the opening that Adrienne Roark will fill in the newly created role of Chief Content Officer.

But Tegna, like many local television group owners, has been implementing what it calls "a series of core operational cost-cutting measures.” Those moves, known in plainer English as “budget cuts," began during the Covid pandemic. They accelerated to get the company in shape for the imminent arrival of Standard General’s management team, which then never came to pass. A dramatic move came recently when the company shuttered its creative services departments at their stations, choosing to centralize those functions at a couple of “regional creative hubs.” The move put a significant number of employees out of work.

That would all be challenging enough for a new Chief Content Officer to face on day one, but perhaps even more of a challenge will be determining how to reverse the damage done by the company’s time working with news provocateur Joel Cheatwood, who was hired during his tenure as a Partner at Red Seat Ventures in 2016. As a consultant to Tegna, Cheatwood prototyped a new vision for local news that was touted as being “revolutionary” by installing a new “digital-centric” sensibility into some Tegna station’s newsrooms. Tegna saw this vision, drank the Kool-Aid, and, in turn, hired Cheatwood as the company’s VP of Content Development in 2018 to install the new vision across all of its stations. Unfortunately, the audiences decided they wanted a more substantive flavor of news, and many of the Tegna stations lost audience share. Cheatwood would be done at Tegna in just two years.

But the vestiges of that ill-advised era are still evident on most Tegna stations, even as they have pivoted, for the most part, back to a more traditional-based newscast. So one of Adrienne Roark's first orders of business will be to see through the self-induced fog of the industry awards that Tegna has seemingly been so focused on gathering over recent years and determining what her vision will be for a group of stations that might be best described as “soldiering on each day” trying to recapture their more successful time as a respected, industry-leading broadcast group.

And the clock on that restoration project could be a relatively short one, as the future of Tegna could be impacted by the potential for a Trump administration-led FCC to loosen further--or even eliminate--any limits on broadcast station ownership. As the thinking goes, survival in the local television business may well be determined by further consolidation of the ownership of local stations by a few large companies that already hold a good number of station licenses in many television markets in the country. In that light, as our friends at TheDesk.Net succinctly put it recently, "Tegna is the broadcaster with the most to gain in a new regulatory environment.” To be clear, they are not the only group owner that could be in play, but they may well be the first in line.

One would hope that Adrienne Roark, like the fictional architect Howard Roark, can find some joy in the work ahead of her.