Bill Dedman is a Pulitzer and Peabody award-winning investigative reporter, bestselling author, and keynote speaker. He has spoken on fair housing and fair lending issues to the National Association of Realtors, the Federal Reserve, HUD, and banking and real estate associations.
Bill received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for his work at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on The Color of Money, his series on racial discrimination by banks and savings and loan associations in middle-income Black neighborhoods. The Color of Money led to expanded federal laws on disclosure of loan data, new financing for middle-income homebuyers, and greater awareness of systemic discrimination. The articles in The Color of Money are online at http://powerreporting.com.
Thirty years later, Bill was one of four lead reporters on Newsday's undercover investigation of racial steering by real estate agents, Long Island Divided. The investigation, published in November 2019, revealed that Long Island’s dominant residential real estate brokerages help reinforce racial segregation through illegal steering of customers. Newsday's team received several national awards for their work, including a Peabody Award. Long Island Divided and its 40-minute documentary film, Testing the Divide, are online at http://newsday.com/divided.
Bill also uncovered the case of the reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark in 2010, documenting her life in reports for NBC News. His nonfiction book, the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune, tells the true story of Clark and her father, the Gilded Age industrialist who founded Las Vegas. Bill is a frequent speaker for financial-planning groups and charities on the lessons learned from the Clark families failures in estate planning.
Bill has reported for The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe.