This Interview Is Part of the Southern Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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1 This interview is part of the Southern Oral History Program collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Other interviews from this collection are available online through www.sohp.org and in the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library. R.43. Special Research Projects: NewStories Interview R-0774 Richard Griffiths 17 March 2015 Abstract – p. 2 Transcript – p. 3 Interview number R-0774 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill. 2 GRIFFITHS, RICHARD T. - ABSTRACT For Richard T. Griffiths, vice president and senior editorial director of CNN, success is built on high standards, long hours and forward thinking. Being in the right place at the right time helps, too. Griffiths and his family emigrated from England in 1974 for his father’s job developing telecommunications technology. This provided Griffiths with the opportunity to attend and graduate from an American high school, an experience that set him on an “extraordinary path,” he said. He went on to college at UNC-Greensboro as a sociology major. While he was a student, he worked various journalism jobs to pay his expenses through college. Yet success as a journalist left less and less time for classes, and ultimately Griffiths chose work over completing his degree. The choice hasn’t held him back. Griffiths’s path to CNN was circuitous. He worked in Greensboro as a news director at WGBG Radio; as a motel desk clerk at Howard Johnson’s; and in numerous positions at WFMY television, the CBS affiliate. Griffiths and his wife moved to St. Louis, where he worked at KTVI, the Fox affiliate, doing long- form programming. For the work, he was honored with an Emmy and a Peabody award. This program was canceled due to lack funding. From there Griffiths went to work for WFAA, an ABC affiliate in Dallas, Texas, where he helped develop one-hour newscasts. Soon, CBS was chasing WFAA’s ratings–and Griffiths. Wooed to the network’s Los Angeles office, Griffiths worked with such luminaries as Bob Schieffer and Charles Kuralt, who taught him “to do great storytelling.” He was promoted to senior producer of the network’s Atlanta bureau, where he remained until it was closed in 1991. The CNN job was the culmination of Griffiths’s years of hard work and tenacity. Among his accomplishments there is development of “The Row,” the network’s “core storytelling and quality control vetting.” Timeliness remains a critical news value, but as social media collapses time, other standards prevail. Interview number R-0774 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill. 3 NewStories, UNC School of Journalism & Mass Communication Oral History Series Transcript: Richard Griffiths Interview Interviewee: Richard Griffiths Date: March 17, 2015 Location: Halls of Fame Room, Carroll Hall, University of North Carolina Interviewer: Cierra “CB” Cotton Interview Length: 55 minutes Special Notes: One of a series of interviews with North Carolina news workers and news makers, newstories.jomc.unc.edu Transcribed by/date: CB Cotton, March 2015 Keywords: CNN, CNN International, CNN en Español, journalism, semantics, language, UNC Greensboro, pulse-code modulation, telephone communication, sociology, Korzybski, campus print shop, WGBG radio, UK, Britain, language, UPI, The Carolinian Newspaper, thousand watt radio station, North Carolina News Network, President Carter, Joseph Califano, social media, Dataminr, Twitter, Snapchat, Michael Jackson, TMZ, Channel 2 WFMY, KTVI, Chancy Kapp, Howard Johnson’s, Harlow, Basildon, Welwyn Garden City, engineering, St. Louis, Dallas, Charlotte, Greensboro, Atlanta, Socialists Workers Party, Charles Kuralt, Bob Schieffer, Jim Loy (?), WFAA, CBS, Richard Schlesinger, World News Tonight, Marty Haag, David Dow (?), Robert Riggs, Doug Fox, Scott Pelley, Byron Harris, Peter Van Sant, Alan Parcell, Gary Reeves, Terry Drinkwater, Jerry Bowen, Rita Braver, Peabody, Columbia DuPont CB Cotton: My name is CB Cotton and I’m here with Richard Griffiths. He is the Senior Editorial Director and Vice President of CNN. We here at the University of North Carolina at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication in the Halls of Fame room. Today is Tuesday, March 17th 2015, at 9:20 a.m. I would first like to start with some background information. Interview number R-0774 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill. 4 Richard Griffiths: Well, first of all let me just simply say that there’s no restriction on this interview. It may be used in any way for as long as you own it or have it. CC: Wonderful. Thank you. RG: As long as the University keeps control of it. CC: Wonderful. Okay. So, for our first question: You emigrated to the United States from England. How old were you then, and what were the circumstances of your family’s move? RG: I came over to the US several times. The first time I was 12 years old. My father was an engineer with ITT in Raleigh. He was working on a very new-fangled kind of telephone communication called “pulse-code modulation,” which was a digitization of the telephone signal. It was a very early thing—it used to be that you had two pairs of copper wire for every telephone conversation. What Dad figured with some other people is how to put multiple conversations on each pair of copper wires. That was a huge cost-savings, because copper wire is very expensive. So when you’re talking about undersea cable or cable that goes from one part of the country to another, you can save a vast amount of money. So his invention they were developing for the American market. In 1968, when I was 12, the whole family came over—supposedly for six months, and then it turned into a year then a year and a half. After that the government said, no, sorry, you’ve overstayed your visa, it’s time to go. So we returned to the UK. We were back from 1969 to 1971, until the government finally relented. The story I was told was that Senator Sam Ervin, the senator from North Carolina, who was, of course, a big star on the Watergate Committee—this was before that—was outraged at the numbers of jobs lost at ITT when Dad and his team were returned to Britain. They worked to get the visas reinstated, and we were invited back in 1971. Ultimately we immigrated in 1974. I went to high school in Raleigh. I finished high school at Sanderson High School, and then got in-state tuition and was allowed to go to UNC- Greensboro—which I did not graduate from, but I went five years and found myself doing more Interview number R-0774 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill. 5 and more journalism and going to fewer and fewer classes, until I was no longer a student. Things happen… CC: It is what it is. RG: …I got a great education there. [Adjusting sound level] CC: Perfect. Sounds like you guys were guests of honor, and what a cool story. I never would have thought that your family had such an extensive back-and-forth with the United States. It sounds like your dad was a very intelligent man. That’s very interesting. You went to UNC-Greensboro. What did you study, and how did you choose that major? RG: I started off as a sociology major because I was really interested in the things that make a society tick. I was always interested in polling research and survey research, and sociology is full of that. So that’s where my focus was, and I ended up taking some really interesting mass media classes with a professor, William Knox or Bill Knox, who was extraordinary in putting mass media and journalism in the heart of culture. Simultaneously with that, I was working at the campus radio station as a way to make ends meet--to get through school. I was working at the print shop…I was working for the campus newspaper. Those three things gave me a real insight into journalism--hands-on--but Bill Knox set me on fire with the understanding of how it worked in the macro level. And we got into all kinds of theory about [Alfred] Korzybski and general semantics. Senator [Samuel Ichiye] Hayakawa’s works on language. And that got me really interested in communications and communicating and how people understand what the stories are that we’re telling. How confusing sometimes they can be. You know you and I can agree that we’re sitting in a piece of furniture. But if I say, “Move the furniture out of this room, into the other room,” you’re going to look around and you’re not sure- -“Well, is it the chair or the table that he wants moved?” So that’s an example of the kinds of confusion that comes about with language as we get into more abstract concepts. And that’s what Bill Knox was teaching and how I got into some of the idiosyncrasies of that side of journalism. Interview number R-0774 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill. 6 CC: Very nice. I love languages--I speak three. RG: Oh, superb! CC: I love them. Tell me about your first journalism job.