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, Missouri, 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 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. “[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, Kansas, 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.
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.
After some other stops, Adams took a job as an anchor with WPRI in Providence in 1989.
Initially she thought Little Rhody would serve as another 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.
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 are a lot of those,” she said. •
