Joe Goodman, one of the last of his kind, died peacefully Sunday morning, Dec. 31, in the house his grandfather built along the banks of Muddy Creek outside Clemmons. He would have been 87 in a couple of weeks.
I’m pretty sure he’d want those of you reading about him for the first time, in this his send off, to know straight away that he was a newsman’s newsman, the real deal. Get the story. Get it right. And, hopefully, get it first. Nothing else mattered. There are not many like him anymore. If you stopped right here, you would have the essence of Joseph Champion Goodman. That, he would say, is good enough.
But I hope you will read on.
You’ll learn that for more than three decades, Joe was an indomitable presence in the Winston-Salem (North Carolina) Journal newsroom, starting as a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, then as its city editor and finally as its boss of the newsroom, managing editor.
