About Me
© Audrey C. Tiernan
Bill Bleyer was a prize-winning staff writer for Newsday, the Long Island daily newspaper, for 33 years before retiring in 2014 to write books and freelance for magazines and Newsday.
He has written seven books published by the History Press: “The Roosevelts in New York City” (2025); The Sinking of the Steamboat Lexington on Long Island Sound (2023); George Washington’s Long Island Spy Ring: A History and Tour Guide (2021); Long Island and the Sea: A Maritime History (2019); Fire Island Lighthouse: Long Island’s Welcoming Beacon (2017); Sagamore Hill: Theodore Roosevelt’s Summer White House (2016); and, with co-author Harrison Hunt, Long Island and the Civil War (2015).
The Long Island native contributed a chapter to the anthology Harbor Voices – New York Harbor tugs, ferries, people, places & more published in 2008. And he was a contributor and editor of Bayville, a history of his Long Island community (Arcadia 2009).
As a Newsday staff writer, Bleyer specialized in history, parks and maritime issues. In 1999-2000, he was one of four full-time Newsday staff writers for “Long Island: Our Story,” a year-long daily history of Long Island that resulted in four books filled thousands of pages in the newspaper. Subsequently he was the paper’s primary history writer. Earlier he wrote the Sunday ‘‘On the Water’’ column for five years.
Bleyer was part of the Newsday team that won a Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1997. He was also on the team that won the Newspaper Guild of New York’s 1984 Page One Award for a series about Social Security disability.
Prior to joining Newsday, Bleyer worked for six years at The Courier-News in Bridgewater, NJ, as a reporter then regional editor. He began his career as editor of the Oyster Bay Guardian for a year.
He has been featured on C-Span and his work has been published in American Heritage, in Smithsonian magazine’s digital edition and in America’s Civil War, Naval History, Sea History, HISTORYNET.com, Nassau County Historical Society Journal, Suffolk County Historical Society Journal, Sail, Boating, Soundings, Professional Mariner, Boating World, Scuba Diving, Underwater USA, Sub Aqua Journal, Discover Diving, Wreck Diver Newsletter, Northeast Dive News, Lighthouse Digest, Civil War News, Irish America, Nonprofit Times, The Motorist, Mass Transit, Science Digest, The American Economist, Pollution Control Journal, Education Weekly, Higher Education Weekly and other magazines and in The New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, The Toronto Star, Edmonton Journal, The Record of Bergen County, NJ, and other newspapers.
Bleyer graduated from Hofstra University Phi Beta Kappa with highest honors in economics with a communications minor in 1974. He earned a MA in urban studies at Queens College of the City University of NY.
He taught an environmental economics course as an adjunct instructor in his senior year at Hofstra in a pilot peer teaching program and then as a Newsday reporter was an adjunct journalism professor and founding president of Hofstra’s Journalism Alumni Association, president of the Chronicle Alumni Association and a member of the board of the School of Communication Alumni Association. In 2015 Bleyer was a recipient of the George M. Estabrook Distinguished Service Award and subsequently served on the Estabrook Award Board as secretary.
Bleyer was an adjunct professor in 2018 at Webb Institute in Glen Cove, team-teaching a course on the maritime history of Long Island, and was a guest lecturer there in 2022.
From 1986 to 1989 he was president of the Press Club of Long Island, the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He has been on the Press Club board for 43 years – the longest serving member in club history. In 1990 and again in 1992, he was elected to the society’s national board of directors and he chaired the national membership and resolutions committees. Since 1994 he has been the treasurer for SPJ’s Northeast Region One, managing a regional fund that he created in 1990. In 2012 he received a top national SPJ award, the Howard S. Dubin Outstanding Pro Member Award for a large chapter for service to the society or a chapter. He was inducted by PCLI into the Long Island Journalism Hall of Fame in June 2015. In 2025 he was named to the Society of Professional Journalists Foundation board.
He has served as a volunteer editor for the Robert W. Greene Summer High School Journalism Institute at Stony Brook University since 2016 and has been chief copy editor since 2017.
In 2018 he was a founder of the Coalition Against An UnSound Tunnel and served as the nonprofit organization’s vice president. Also in 2018, he was named to the board of Friends of the Bay, the Oyster Bay environmental group. The following year he became secretary and has served as president since January 2020.