The first audience Karen Adams ever called her own consisted of a black French poodle named Lady. Adams, then about 7, would head to her backyard in Nevada, Mo., and read to the dog. Years later, her audience has grown, as tens of thousands of television viewers tune in to see Adams anchor weekday evening news broadcasts on WPRI-TV CBS 12.
In March, Adams marked 21 years with the station and 21 years as a Rhode Islander, one who found her way to the East Coast after growing up in a Midwestern city of fewer than 9,000 people.
“I don’t know if I had any grand plan” growing up, said Adams, 54. “[But] it certainly wasn’t going on in Nevada, Missouri.”
Adams found affection for reading, writing and public speaking in school. She joined her high school yearbook staff and starred in theater productions during high school and college.
Her interest in journalism started during college at Missouri State University, where she majored in speech and theater. During summers in Nevada, the local, low-watt radio station sent her to the fire department and hospital to report the daily logs. Adams found herself reporting trash can fires and hospital admissions and discharges – and loving it. Time with her college class at the Missouri Public Broadcasting Station also piqued her interest.
“It was all just pointing me in the right direction, even though it hadn’t formed in my mind what I would do,” Adams said. Eventually she added a minor in journalism.
Adams graduated in December 1975, a semester early, and found herself unemployed and living with her parents. Her mother, doubtful that Adams could find a job in the journalism industry, pressured her to apply for a position at an insurance agency in Fort Scott, Kan., a small city about 20 miles west of her hometown. Adams begrudgingly applied and was hired on a Monday to reconcile numbers on reams of paper.
By Tuesday, Adams was reapplying to every radio and television station she had approached as a graduating college senior. On Wednesday, a radio station in Joplin, Mo., offered her a news director position.
By Thursday, Adams had quit the insurance company. Four days later, Adams became one of the youngest radio news directors in the country at the ripe old age of 21, working “a million, zillion hours” covering the local beat.
About five months later Adams accepted a job as a reporter at television station KOAM, a CBS affiliate covering the Joplin market. She made $100 a week, not exactly a high-flying salary, even at the time. But Adams loved the job. Her father could brag about her at the local coffee shop while her initially skeptical mother could see her reports if the family’s television antennas cooperated. Five years later she was news director.
About 1983, Adams took a position as news director for a television station in Salisbury, Md.
“It was fun, because we were all kind of learning as we were going,” said Adams, who at the time was one of the youngest television news directors in the country and one of very few women in that position.
Adams later went to a station in Charlotte, N.C., as an anchor and then news director. In the late 1980s, she started seeing signs that the station would be sold and shopped around her tapes. Her prediction proved right and in 1989 Adams took a job as an anchor with WPRI in Providence in 1989.
Initially she thought Little Rhody would serve as a stopover, but the intimacy of the state intrigued her. In Missouri she was lucky to see the governor and state’s congressional delegation once a year. In the Ocean State they seem to pop up everywhere and everyone knows everyone.
“Rhode Island is a different story every day, and the people in the state are just fascinating,” Adams said.
At WPRI Adams sits across from the station’s investigative reporter, Tim White. The anchor said she enjoys hearing White as he pieces together the next big story. White in turn appreciates her interest in digging into the day’s news.
And despite her position behind a desk, Adams still loves covering the fast-paced world of breaking news. She is particularly proud of the station’s extended coverage of The Station nightclub fire in 2003. And she looks forward to election nights, a news story that no producer can script. Being forced to think on her feet is what keeps Adams going.
“It separates the journalists and the Barbie doll anchors, and there’s a lot of those,” she said.
In 2005 the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences inducted her into its “Silver Circle” in honor of her decades in the industry and relentless reporting. This month, the University of Rhode Island will confer an honorary doctor of humane letters on her for her “generosity of spirit and commitment to helping others.”
She serves on the boards of Meeting Street School, the Providence Preservation Society and the Community Preparatory School in Providence. She is a frequent sight at Big Sisters of Rhode Island, Special Olympics and Trinity Repertory Company events, among others.
“I think it’s important to give back to the community, because honestly, I feel like I’ve been very lucky,” Adams said.
Adams said it also forges personal connections with potential viewers that may tune into her broadcast after seeing her at an event. But she’s still working on drawing in one special viewer, her chocolate Labrador retriever, Abby, who lives with Adams in Lincoln. Sometimes Adams finds herself talking to the dog, just as she spoke to Lady many moons ago.
“People probably think I’m loony,” Adams said with a laugh. “But I think she listens.” •
