Joel Dreyfuss


Joel Dreyfuss is a Haitian-American journalist whose career spans more than 40 years in U.S. media. He has been a writer, columnist, editor and news executive with large media companies and an entrepreneur and investor in new-media startups. During his career he has covered international stories in Asia, Latin America and Europe across a broad spectrum of topics. His thousands of interviews have ranged across categories: from James Brown to Steve Jobs to Toyota's Shoichiro Toyoda.

Personal life

A native of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Dreyfuss grew up in France, Liberia and the U.S. He earned a B.S. degree at the City College of New York and was an Urban Journalism Fellow at the University of Chicago. He is a co-founder of the National Association of Black Journalists and a member of the organization's Hall of Fame. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has served on the board of directors of the American Society of Magazine Editors and is on the board of the Haitian Roundtable.
Dreyfuss now divides his time between New York City and Paris, France. He is working on a book about his family's 300-year association with Haiti.

Career

Dreyfuss has been a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. He was the managing editor of The Root from 2009 to 2011. He has worked for the Washington Post, USA Today, and Bloomberg News. He spent a decade at Fortune magazine, served in two separate stints, first as an associate editor and Tokyo Bureau Chief and later as a senior editor and technology columnist. While based in Tokyo, Dreyfuss also reported from Hong Kong, Thailand, and South Korea. As a senior writer at Bloomberg, he reported and wrote major features for Bloomberg Markets magazine from Japan and Europe.
In 2004, Dreyfuss was asked to relaunch Red Herring magazine, the legendary chronicler of Silicon Valley's venture capital industry and startup companies. The new version was a weekly news magazine with a strong international focus. Dreyfuss oversaw more than 100 print issues of the new Red Herring featuring regular coverage of technology development in China, Korea and India. Red Herring staged successful technology conferences in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing during his tenure.
In the 1990s, Dreyfuss was the editor of PC Magazine, the largest computer publication in the U.S. and later editor-in-chief and associate publisher of tech industry weekly Information Week. He served as editor-in-chief of Urban Box Office, a dot-com startup that raised $35 million from investors. Earlier in his career he was a reporter for the Associated Press and the New York Post and executive editor of Black Enterprise magazine. He is co-author, with Charles Lawrence III, of The Bakke Case: The Politics of Inequality.