Andrew Rowan, a 25-year-old Cherry Hill native, has built nearly 80,000 followers across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok by turning his NBC10 transportation segments into short vertical video clips for social media.
The Jewish Community Voice profiled Rowan on Oct. 22, tracing how the local kid who grew up glued to NBC10 landed a reporting job at the same station. His bar mitzvah theme was "Late Night With Andrew Rowan," styled after the network's programming. His favorite anchor growing up was Keith Jones, "because he did the news when I got home from school," Rowan told the publication.
Rowan now lives in Center City but his beat regularly brings him back to Cherry Hill and Voorhees. In a recent Facebook reel about the Kresson Road construction project, he referenced a quip from Associate Rabbi Sam Hollander of Congregation Beth El in Voorhees, Rowan's childhood synagogue. Hollander joked during his Yom Kippur sermon that "every road in Voorhees and Cherry Hill has been under construction."
The Kresson Road work is real. Camden County's roadwork page listed lane closures and paving operations on Kresson Road during the week of Sept. 21 through Sept. 25. Paving was delayed on the first night until 8 p.m. to accommodate Yom Kippur traffic.
Rowan's social media approach started at Northwestern University, where he worked on the campus TV station's 6 p.m. newscast. He noticed none of his classmates watched it, so he launched a shorter streaming show that could be recut into vertical clips, the Jewish Community Voice reported. The strategy helped the Northwestern News Network boost its Facebook engagement by 644 percent, according to his LinkedIn page as cited by the publication.
Before NBC10, Rowan reported for WCPO 9 in Cincinnati and NBC Connecticut, where he gained large followings and millions of views by producing daily vertical video, the Jewish Community Voice reported.
Hollander, who also grew up in Cherry Hill, serves as associate rabbi at Congregation Beth El.
Rowan told the Jewish Community Voice he plans to eventually narrow his platform focus. For now, his transportation beat keeps pulling him back to the roads he grew up driving.
