After the passing of Newsday and New York Daily News columnist, Jim Dwyer, there was a buzz among elected officials who mourned the passing of a man whose writing was close to the hearts of many New Yorkers.
Dwyer was 63 when he died of complications from lung cancer on Oct. 8.
Dwyer was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who chronicled the lives of New Yorkers, often through the narrative tool of the city’s expansive transit system with Subway Lives being one of his crowning achievements having been published in 1991 alongside his work documenting 9/11.
MTA Chairman Pat Foye said that Dwyer’s death was close to home as the were often sync with one another through vocation, but also their upbringing in Manhattan as well as their time together at Fordham College.
“Jim’s passing is an immense loss for his family, colleagues, all who knew him, and also for this city. His coverage of the subways–first as a reporter and later as a columnist–brought critical attention to the role that mass transit plays in the lives of New Yorkers and the critical work of transit workers. That reporting helped fuel a new cycle of investment in the system and many of the improvements from that era live on today,” Foye said. “Jim’s prose could be doggedly critical, but it was also marked by a profound empathy for New York and its people. His writing after 9/11 humanized the experiences of New Yorkers and brought a measure of comfort to a city still trying to make sense of tragedy.”
Dwyer’s passing left Governor Andrew Cuomo wondering – on a call with members of the press – where all the good journalists have gone, waxing about how the tech-driven reality of 21st century reporting does not hold up against the classic columnists such as Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hammill and Jack Newfield.
“To say it’s a great loss to journalism is to understate it. It’s a great loss to journalism but he was just a great New Yorker and a powerful voice for many, many years,” Cuomo said. “[It] was a different type of journalism back then. It was not journalism that was 280 characters in a Tweet. They wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t think that you could do it. And it was not about ‘he said, she said’. I say in the video, when journalism becomes ‘he said, she said’ – he says the world is round, she says the world is flat – when that’s the extent of journalism, don’t be surprised when half the population thinks the world is flat because there was no arbiter of truth.”
Dwyer is survived by his wife Cathy, and children Maura and Catherine.
