Jessica Roe is a Community Reporter for KSBY News, based in the San Luis Obispo area. Throughout her career, she has taken pride in bringing original news stories to everyday broadcast and digital storytelling by creating and cultivating sources in the communities in which she has lived.
Jessica brings 32 years of journalism experience to this role, and different regional chapters of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) have recognized and awarded her with six Emmy awards, ranging from Best Newscast to Breaking News Field Coverage.
Prior to returning to her original roots as an on-camera Multimedia Journalist (MMJ), Jessica excelled in leading newsrooms and journalism teams throughout the country, ranging from the 6 p.m. producer at the then-NBC station in San Francisco, KRON-TV, a top five television market, to Executive Producer at KUSA-TV (NBC-Denver, CO), to Vice President at Weather Nation, and News Director at KHQ-TV (Spokane, WA).
Primarily, Jessica’s career has been at NBC affiliate stations, where she also worked at KOB-TV (Albuquerque, NM) and KOAA-TV (Colorado Springs, CO). Jessica freelanced for several years at the network level for NBC News, responding as a Field Producer and Interview Booker for The Today Show, Nightly News, MSNBC, and NBC Digital. She also worked at Dateline NBC as a freelance producer, where the legal and investigative work inspired her to earn her Licensed Private Investigator (LPI) license in Colorado, California, and several other states.
Jessica went back to school later in life and graduated from the University of Denver with a Master of Laws in Legal Studies in 2019 after previously earning her Journalism degree at Colorado State University in 1996. Additionally, she spent time as a spokesperson for Colorado’s former Governor John Hickenlooper, who is currently a U.S. Senator. Jessica is proud to be a part of the “Over 50” crowd, and she takes pride in telling stories of those “eligible for AARP,” as she says.
Jessica is proud to uniquely cover news in the SLO area through storytelling, working daily to ensure news and headlines she covers truly resonate with television viewers and web readers, by working to include voices of the community, and always growing and cultivating her contacts as potential sources for story ideas, and people she can reach out to for expertise on the various topics she covers. Jessica leans on the principles of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) in her storytelling, which teaches that visual storytelling outpaces bare facts because it actively engages the brain, triggers empathy, and transforms audiences into active participants. By using human elements and sensory details, stories transfer experiences rather than just information. Jessica personally attended the NPPA's Advanced Storytelling Workshop, not once, but twice - in 1995 and 1996 - which teaches journalists to champion narrative journalism.
As a mother of two college students, Jessica enjoys the opportunity to cover news happenings at our local universities, including Cal Poly University and Cuesta College in SLO County. She is on faculty currently at Cal Poly where she teaches Public Speaking, and she has previously been on faculty at the University of Denver where she taught Media Law and Advanced Reporting. Jessica's daughter is currently a Mustang, and her son is in his senior year as a Cadet First Class (C1C) at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado Springs, where he also serves as a Squadron Commander and expects to head to flight school after graduation. Jessica has spent the last half-decade working in consulting with companies and public-sector clients adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) at an enterprise scale, and practicing expertise in Human Resources (HR) and Project Management, where she is both a SHRM® SCP (Senior Certified Professional) and PMP® (Project Management Professional) certified.
You can follow the stories Jessica covers as she posts them on her Facebook Page or send her a story idea via her email at Jessica.Roe@ksby.com.
