Sitrick & Co. hires business journalists Kneale, Pfeifer

Los Angeles-based Sitrick & Co. has hired two business journalists — one a former CNBC and Fox Business Network anchor and another from the Los Angeles Times.

The public relations company announced Wednesday that it has hired Dennis Kneale, an anchor and senior correspondent at CNBC and Fox Business Network after serving as managing editor of Forbes magazine and as a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal. Kneale will work in the New York office of Sitrick.

Stuart Pfeifer, a biotech and health care journalist at The Los Angeles Times, has joined the Los Angeles office.

Kneale formed media-strategy consulting firm Dennis Kneale Media in early 2014 after spending six years at CNBC and Fox. For the nine years prior he was at Forbes magazine, where he served as the sole managing editor.

He started his career at The Journal, where he rose to senior editor and oversaw much of the paper’s coverage of AIDS breakthroughs that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997. He focused on technology, media and entertainment, health care and science, and Wall Street and private equity.

“I have worked on the other side of the desk from Dennis for more than 15 years,” CEO Michael Sitrick said in a statement. “And from the start I was impressed with his intellect, abilities and breadth of knowledge.”

In 2009, while anchoring a nightly post-recession meltdown show on CNBC, Kneale accurately called the end of the Great Recession and began urging investors to buy stocks one month after what turned out to be the market bottom.

Pfeifer joins Sitrick after a career of more than 25 years as a newspaper journalist. He was a staff writer with The Times from 2000 to 2015, most recently covering biotech and pharmaceutical companies, health care and hospitals for the Business section.

Pfeifer reported on the riots that followed the Rodney King verdicts, the Orange County bankruptcy, and several high-profile trials. He was also part of a team of reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for coverage of a series of devastating Southern California wildfires. His other assignments at the paper included coverage of legal affairs, law enforcement and government.

Prior to that, he was staff writer at The Orange County Register. Pfeifer holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from California State University, Fullerton.

“While Stuart’s experience is much broader than biotech and health care, his in-depth knowledge in this area will be of significant benefit to the firm’s current and future clients,” Sitrick said in a statement.