Andy Rose has a lot of experience telling stories. The Murray native was recently promoted to senior news desk reporter at CNN, a milestone in a journalism career spanning more than three decades. But long before reaching the halls of CNN, Rose traces many of the skills that would shape his career back to an after-school activity he began in middle school.
“Actually, a lot of it came from the speech team,” he said.
Rose said that it was his time on the speech team that really propelled him toward a career in the news.
Speech and debate, also known as forensics, is divided into three main categories. Rose’s primary events fell under public speaking, while other students compete in interpretation events, performing dramatic or humorous works, or in debate. Teams compete at tournaments throughout the school year, with some students advancing to state and national competitions.
Beginning in sixth grade at Calloway County Middle School, Rose competed in Extemporaneous Speaking. The event, known as “extemp,” required competitors to draw from a selection of current news topics, create a seven-minute speech and deliver it to a panel of judges – from memory – with only 30 minutes to prepare.
“You had to constantly be studying the news, all through the week, in order to be prepared for what you’re going to talk about,” Rose said. “Like, you had to follow all of the news all of the time.”
Rose, the son of Janice Rose and the late Jack Rose, who served as Murray’s mayor from 2014 to 2018, was already a news junkie at age 12. Still, it took some time for him to become certain he wanted a career in the news industry.
“I thought you had to be nosy to be a journalist,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not a nosy person.”
Watching major events unfold on television and reading about them while preparing for speech competitions made him reconsider his future.
“I realized I was interested in being a part of the events that people were covering,” Rose said, “to be there in person and see them happening.”
As his confidence grew through speech competitions, Rose said he discovered he could be part of the news without feeling as though he were being nosy. He said he could simply be himself – someone who wanted to learn more and share that knowledge with others.
Later, at Calloway County High School, Rose competed in Radio Broadcasting, an event where students prepared a five-minute professional news broadcast simulation. He explained that it was this category that helped him find his voice both literally and figuratively.
“I kind of knew – even before the speech team – that I wanted to be in broadcasting since elementary school,” Rose said.
While Rose occasionally competed in impromptu speaking, extemp and broadcasting were his best events. In 1995, he was a semifinalist in extemp at the National Forensics League’s annual national tournament. He was also the Kentucky High School Speech League state champion in broadcasting for three consecutive years, from 1993 to 1995.
“He was a bit shy at first,” remembered Larry England, Rose’s high school speech coach, “but Andy was a born broadcaster.”
His time competing gave him confidence and taught him to see obstacles not as barriers but as opportunities to learn. The high expectations of the team also pushed him to work hard and succeed.
“You had to be able to compete at a high level. Calloway and Murray High took the speech team very seriously,” he said.
Rose’s journalism career began when he was 16, when he started working at radio stations around Murray. He worked at 1130 WSJP-AM, which is now WBZB, 1340 WNBS-AM and 103.7 WBLN-FM, which is now WFGE.
“I mostly worked on weekends since I was busy with high school work, but I would occasionally fill in on weekdays and during the holiday breaks,” he said. “I got to co-host ‘The Breakfast Show’ a few times!”
He graduated from the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media in 1999.
While at UK, he did some reporting for the public radio station WUKY and later worked as a part-time reporter for WVLK-AM. The position became a full-time job after graduation. From there, Rose worked as an anchor at WVLK and a reporter at WKYT-TV, both in Lexington. He later worked as a radio anchor for Clear Channel Radio and as a news anchor at another radio station, 106.7 FM.
During this time, Rose covered the Atlanta courthouse killings and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He also received Associated Press awards for breaking coverage of the Michael Vick dogfighting arrest and live breaking coverage of an Atlanta winter storm.
In 2007, Rose started at CNN as a radio anchor and became national desk editor in 2020.
In his new position as senior news desk reporter, he primarily writes breaking news and legal, crime and political stories for CNN’s website in a style more similar to magazine or newspaper journalism.
“I really enjoy the fact that I’ve been in this business for 30 years or so, and I still get the chance to do something different,” Rose said.
Unlike the short, fact-focused stories Rose once produced in broadcast journalism, his new role at CNN allows him to explore stories in greater depth.
“For a long time, when I was in radio, where stories are 20 to 30 seconds long each, you really have to boil everything down to its essence, for good reason,” Rose said. “But as a journalist, it’s really rewarding to get a fuller picture of the context of these stories.”
Though most of his career hasn’t been spent writing longer stories for the web, he has plenty of colleagues at the network to learn from.
“It’s been really rewarding to get the opportunity to learn from my colleagues who have done this for so much longer,” Rose said. “It’s really cool.”
Another part of Rose’s new role at CNN is mentoring new journalists, as well as colleagues in other departments at the network. He joked about some of the major technological differences between generations of journalists.
“When I was first starting out, you literally had to drive to the police station to take a picture of a booking photo,” Rose stated. “Finding that information as a journalist, now, is much easier.”
But he added that more questionable information is also being posted online.
“You really have to develop the skills to figure out what’s reliable and what isn’t,” Rose said. “You’re going to get a lot of feedback a lot more quickly – and sometimes a lot more harshly than you used to.”
Rose advises those he mentors to take feedback seriously without allowing criticism to overwhelm them or prevent them from doing their jobs.
What Rose loves most about journalism is the opportunity to witness events firsthand.
“Whether it’s (at) a trial or on a campus or at a protest (or at) a city council meeting, anything that’s happening, that’s one of the things that got me interested in journalism – the ability to be there,” Rose said.
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