Chris Rosa is high energy. Talks fast, writes faster. As a senior editor at NBC Entertainment whose job is to drive web traffic with a steady diet of pop culture candy, he doesn’t have a choice. As a lifelong pop culture junkie, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
We meet by the elevators in the mall under 30 Rockefeller Center and duck into the first business we see — a brightly lit cookie café called Chip City. “We can talk here if that works,” he says.
Of course it works. 30 Rock is 30 Rock. Anyway, it’s late afternoon and Rosa keeps a busy schedule. He flew in last night from L.A., where he was on a freelance assignment for Glamour. He spent 5½ years at the popular women’s magazine before he joined NBC in 2022, and his former editors still hit him up.
This time, it’s a cover story on Christina Aguilera. Last time, it was another pop singer, Camila Cabello, and before that, Demi Lovato. He wrote his first Glamour cover story in 2018 on This Is Us actress Chrissy Metz.
“I love flexing the managerial muscle at NBC and helping other writers, but I still need to do these passion projects every few months,” he says. “And they’re cool with that here. I went to my boss, and she said, ‘Oh my God! Go ahead! Have fun!’ It fuels my love for writing, which is ultimately where it all started.”
As for when it all started, you’ll have to flash back a little further. “I was a weird
kid,” he explains. “At, like,
13 I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I was obsessed with watching E! I was obsessed
with magazines. I’d make my dad get any Rolling Stone with Britney Spears on the cover.
I was voracious for any kind of pop culture stuff.”
But he knew he had to start small. In high school, he spent a semester at the Lexington Chronicle profiling beauty queens, teachers back from trips overseas — “feature-y human interest stuff.” At USC, he majored in public relations, wrote for The Daily Gamecock and pitched a Madonna review to Garnet & Black.
“I love flexing the managerial muscle at NBC and helping other writers, but I still need to do these passion projects every few months.”
“Writing pop culture articles, that’s all I wanted to do,” he says. “By the time I had written my fourth or fifth pop review, my editors were like, ‘Can you write about anything else?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, but I don’t want to!’”
So he didn’t. He became an editor at Garnet & Black, but pop culture was still his jam. He racked up local clips at Jasper and The Free Times, submitted reviews and listicles to small websites that no longer exist and cold emailed every publication imaginable, anywhere for a foothold. “I applied everywhere, truly everywhere that I could think of,” he says. “I got two offers from literally hundreds and hundreds of applications.”
But one of those offers was for a summer internship at MTV in New York, where he scored his first celebrity interview — with The O.C.’s Adam Brody. The next summer he landed an internship with VH1, again in New York.
And he never really left. He’s now in management, overseeing a small team tasked
with using search engine optimization and clever headlines to drive traffic to NBC.com
and Peacock. But he’s still up to his eyeballs
in pop culture, and the rush is just as sweet.
“They wanted someone with an editorial background to come in and sort of lead that ship, and I’m really proud of the work we’ve done over the past three years,” he says. “And I love it at NBC. I’m having the best time.”