Joel Dreyfuss

Journalist Joel Dreyfuss was born on September 17, 1945 in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti to Anne-Marie Timothee Dreyfuss and Roger Edmund Dreyfuss. He received his B.S. degree in sociology from the City College of New York in 1971.

After graduating from the City College of New York, Dreyfuss was hired as a reporter for the New York Post. He also served as an urban journalism fellow at the University of Chicago in 1972 prior to being hired, in 1973, as a reporter for The Washington Post. In 1976, Dreyfuss moved to San Francisco, California, where he worked first as a freelance journalist for various magazines before joining KPIX-TV as a news producer and KQED-FM as a news reporter. In 1980, Dreyfuss joined Black Enterprise magazine in New York as the executive editor before being hired as the New York bureau chief for USA TODAY and by Fortune Magazine as an associate editor and Tokyo bureau chief in 1983. Dreyfuss then worked as the editor of PC Magazine until 1994. During this time, Dreyfuss served as editor-in-chief of InformationWeek at CMP Media and as editor-in-chief of Our World News, a start-up national weekly news publication written for African American readers. In 1997, he returned to Fortune Magazine as a senior editor and personal technology columnist. Dreyfuss then joined Bloomberg LP as a senior writer for Bloomberg Markets magazine in 2001. He worked as editor-in-chief of Red Herring in 2004 and as managing editor for The Root in 2009. Dreyfuss was hired as the editor-in-chief of Urban Box Office before founding Dreyfuss & Co., an editorial consulting and freelance writing firm in 2011, whose clients included CNBC and The Huffington Post.

In 1979, Dreyfuss and Charles Lawrence, III published the book The Bakke Case: The Politics of Inequality with Harcourt publishing. He has written for numerous publications including the Associated Press, The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Redbook, Book Review, and The Progressive. His articles and essays have also appeared in The Butterfly’s Way, an anthology of Haitian diasporic writers edited by Edwidge Danticat in 2001.

Dreyfuss co-founded the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in 1975. He also served as a Pulitzer juror and as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Haitian Roundtable board, and the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) board of directors.

Dreyfuss has received numerous awards and honors including an induction into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame, an induction into the City College of New York’s Communications Hall of Fame in 2011, and the Townsend Harris Medal from the City College of New York in 2021.

Joel Dreyfuss was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on July 15, 2024 and July 16, 2024.