Jim Dwyer was an American reporter, columnist, and author. He was born in Manhattan on March 4, 1957. He graduated from Fordham in 1979 with a degree in general science. In 1980, he received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Early in his career he worked as a reporter for several New Jersey newspapers, The Hudson Dispatch in Union City (1980-1982), The Elizabeth Daily Journal (1982), and The Record of Hackensack (1983-1984). He then joined New York Newsday as a reporter. Later he switched to columnist, covering subways and then general topics (1986-1995). He joined the New York Times in 2001 and wrote the "About New York" column 2007-2020.
He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for columns in New York Newsday. He also won as part of the New York Newsday team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting covering a subway derailment in Manhattan.
He was the author or co-author of six books including; Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the Subways (1991); Two Seconds Under the Worlds (1994) with Dee Murphy, David Kocieniewski and Peg Tyre; Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted (2000) with Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck; 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Rwin Towers (2005) ; False Conviction: Innocence, Guilt, and Science (2014); More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys, Three Years, and a Chronicle of Ideas and Ambition in Silicon Valley (2015).
Jim Dwyer died on October 8, 2020, in New York City. He was 63.
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