Griffeth, Bill 1958(?)- (William C. Griffeth)

PERSONAL:

Born c. 1958, in Los Angeles, CA; married; wife's name Cindy; children: Chad, Charlie. Education: California State University, Northridge, B.S., 1980. Hobbies and other interests: Genealogy.

ADDRESSES:

Home—NJ.

CAREER:

Financial journalist. Financial News Network (FNN), Santa Monica, CA, founding producer, journalist, 1981-91; Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC), Fort Lee, NJ, journalist, anchor for television shows, including Market Wrap, Mutual Fund Investor, Money Club, and as cohost of Power Lunch. Helped develop CNBC's Student Stock Tournament, an educational, online stock-picking contest for fourth to twelfth graders.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Distinguished Alumnus Award, California State University, Northridge, 2000; Distinguished Service Award in Investor Education, the National Association of Investors Corporation, 2001.

WRITINGS:

Bill Griffeth's 10 Steps to Financial Prosperity, Warner Books (New York, NY), 1994, also published as Bill Griffeth's 10 Steps to Financial Prosperity: CNBC Award Winning Anchor Shows You How to Achieve Financial Independence, Probus Publishing (Chicago, IL), 1994.

Bill Griffeth Interviews the Mutual Fund Masters: A Revealing Look into the Minds & Strategies of Wall Street's Best & Brightest, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1995.

By Faith Alone: One Family's Epic Journey through 400 Years of American Protestantism (memoir), Harmony Books (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Financial journalist Bill Griffeth was born William C. Griffeth circa 1958, in Los Angeles, California. He earned his bachelor of science degree in journalism from California State University, Northridge, in 1980. The next year, Griffeth joined the fledgling Financial News Network (FNN) as both a journalist and a founding producer. The network was the first cable television network devoted solely to business news. FNN began airing in Santa Monica, California, and soon became well known. The staff was made up of a number of novice journalists, as well. In an interview for Variety with Stuart Levine, Griffeth stated, "You could learn your trade in front of a small audience. There were no business journalists. We had to bring together [television] people who knew the business world."

Although FNN aired for almost a full decade and set the earliest standards for reporting business news, it eventually succumbed to its competition, which improved FNN's product and eventually drove them out of the market. In 1990, FNN filed for bankruptcy and was purchased by its major competitor, the Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC). Griffeth, with several coworkers, went on to CNBC as well, moving across the country with his family in order to have easy access to the cable television channel's filming studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. At the new network, Griffeth became the host of a number of shows in succession, including Market Wrap, Mutual Fund Investor, Money Club, and most recently, Power Lunch. Over the course of his career, involving both FNN and CNBC, Griffeth has been nominated for a total of seven Cable ACE awards (for cable television excellence). He also participated in the development of the CNBC Student Stock Tournament, an educational, online stock-picking contest for students in the fourth to the twelfth grades.

In addition to his network duties, Griffeth has written several books, including Bill Griffeth's 10 Steps to Financial Prosperity, 1994, which was reprinted in the same year as Bill Griffeth's 10 Steps to Financial Prosperity: CNBC Award Winning Anchor Shows You How to Achieve Financial Independence, and Bill Griffeth Interviews the Mutual Fund Masters: A Revealing Look into the Minds & Strategies of Wall Street's Best & Brightest. He has also written a memoir, By Faith Alone: One Family's Epic Journey through 400 Years of American Protestantism, which chronicles his experiences after becoming interested in genealogy. Griffeth traced his lineage back in time and discovered that he is directly descended from one of the women who was tried and convicted at the Salem witch trials, and who was executed in 1692. Due to this discovery, Griffeth developed a near obsession regarding his family tree, and over the course of three years, he researched endlessly, using books, the Internet, and traveling to gather impressions of the places where his family lived. In his search, Griffeth learned that most of his family fled from religious persecution, as they were almost all Protestants of some sort, including Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Lutherans. He also found a link between his family and the founder of the Mormon Church. Once he had traced a large portion of his family tree, Griffeth set off with his wife and children to see many of the places he had researched, hoping to meet with his more-distant relatives. The book recounts Griffeth's discoveries and the ways in which his ancestors were involved in several of the earlier roots of Protestantism. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked that the work reflects "touching insights garnered from a single extended family's odyssey of faith." Eric Norton, in a review for Library Journal, observed that in By Faith Alone, Griffeth attempts to "combine a history of Protestantism with his own family history, but … isn't successful on either count." Booklist contributor June Sawyers stated, though, that individuals "interested in genealogy, religion,… or American history" should enjoy Griffeth's "effortless juxtapositioning of the personal and the historical."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Griffeth, Bill, By Faith Alone: One Family's Epic Journey through 400 Years of American Protestantism (memoir), Harmony Books (New York, NY), 2007.

PERIODICALS

Barron's, July 17, 1995, review of Bill Griffeth Interviews the Mutual Fund Masters: A Revealing Look into the Minds & Strategies of Wall Street's Best & Brightest, p. 43.

Booklist, January 1, 1995, David Rouse, review of Bill Griffeth Interviews the Mutual Fund Masters, p. 787; December 15, 2007, June Sawyers, review of By Faith Alone, p. 6.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2007, review of By Faith Alone.

Library Journal, June 15, 1994, Alex Wenner, review of Bill Griffeth's 10 Steps to Financial Prosperity, p. 78; December 1, 1994, Mark McCullough, review of Bill Griffeth Interviews the Mutual Fund Masters, p. 106; December 1, 2007, Eric Norton, review of By Faith Alone, p. 124.

Odyssey, March 1, 2000, "Kids Compete in the Stock Market … & WIN!," author information, p. 25.

Publishers Weekly, October 15, 2007, review of By Faith Alone, p. 57.

Variety, April 26, 1999, Stuart Levine, "Anchors Away from L.A. College Roots," author interview, p. 35.

ONLINE

Bill Griffeth Home Page,http://www.billgriffeth.com (August 19, 2008).

Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC) Web site,http://www.cnbc.com/ (August 19, 2008), staff profile.