Jim Dwyer (March 4, 1957October 8, 2020) was an American journalist and author. He was a reporter and columnist with The New York Times, and the author or co-author of six non-fiction books. A native New Yorker, Dwyer wrote columns for New York Newsday and the New York Daily News before joining the Times. He appeared in the 2012 documentary film Central Park Five and was portrayed on stage in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy (2013). Dwyer had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his "compelling and compassionate columns about New York City" and was also a member of the New York Newsday team that won the 1992 Pulitzer for spot news reporting for coverage of a subway derailment in Manhattan.
Biography
Dwyer was born on March 4, 1957, in Manhattan, one of four sons of Philip and Mary (née Molloy) Dwyer, who were Irish Catholic immigrants. Dwyer graduated from the Msgr. William R. Kelly School in 1971. At the Loyola School, he played several sports, joined the drama club, was editor of the school newspaper and graduated in 1975. He later attended Fordham University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in general science, in 1979. While in Fordham, future Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo was his classmate. In 1980, he received a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Dwyer married Catherine Muir, a professor of computer sciences, in 1981. They had two daughters; Maura Dwyer and Catherine Elizabeth Dwyer.
Dwyer died on October 8, 2020, at the age of 63, due to complications of lung cancer.
Career
In 1992, Dwyer was a member of a team at New York Newsday that won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Reporting for their coverage of the 1991 Union Square derailment, and in 1995, as a columnist with New York Newsday, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for compassionate and compelling columns about New York City. Besides The New York Times and Newsday, he worked at the Hudson Dispatch, the Elizabeth Daily Journal, The Record of Hackensack, and the New York Daily News. He joined the Times in May 2001 and contributed to the paper's coverage of the September 11 attacks, the invasion of Iraq, and how intelligence was allegedly manipulated to create the illusion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. He was the About New York columnist at the Times from April 2007 until his death in 2020.
Works
Dwyer is the author or co-author of six non-fiction books, including the below:
More Awesome Than Money
More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys, Three Years, and a Chronicle of Ideals and Ambition in Silicon Valley (published November 2015), is a non-fiction account of four boys who set out to combat Facebook’s monopoly on social media by building an alternative social network called Diaspora. Writing in The Daily Beast, Jake Whitney described the book as "a thrilling read, astoundingly detailed and researched, alternately suspenseful and heartbreaking." The book follows the four New York University undergraduates as they are inspired by the law professor and historian Eben Moglen to create a better social network, through a deluge of support they receive on Kickstarter in 2010, the death of co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy in 2011, up until the transfer of the project in 2013 to a community of free software developers who continue to refine it. Their work is placed in the context of the dynamic relationships between the open web, digital surveillance, and free society, and the continuing efforts of groups like the Mozilla Foundation to prevent domination of the web by commercial interests. "In the shadows, more and more idealists express their opposition in code — hackers with a moral compass," Marcus Brauchli wrote in The Washington Post, calling the book a "lively account" that "finds heroism and success, betrayal and even, ultimately, tragedy in the hurtling pursuit of a cause."