Geoffrey Goodman

Geoffrey George Goodman CBE (2 July 1922 – 5 September 2013) was a British journalist, broadcaster and writer. Following periods on the News Chronicle and the Daily Herald, he was a senior journalist on the Daily Mirror from 1969 to 1986. He was the founding editor of the quarterly British Journalism Review in 1989, and remained its editor until 2002.

He was born in , Cheshire (now Greater Manchester) and was the only child of Edythe (née Bowman) and Michael Goodman, whose Jewish parents had emigrated to Britain from Poland and Russia. His father spent long periods unemployed, and the family moved to Camden Town, London in 1935 in an attempt to change their situation. Goodman was influenced in his choice of becoming a political journalist by overhearing current affairs being discussed in the local dairy, and a shop keeper reporting that the newspapers refused to print stories about the Prince of Wales with Wallis Simpson, "despite most of us knowing exactly what is going on".

After adding a year to his age, he enlisted at the beginning of the Second World War. An RAF pilot during his war service (1941-6), he ended the war as a Flight Lieutenant flying Mosquito planes on photography missions. Goodman studied at the London School of Economics under Harold Laski. In January 1947, he married Margit Freudenbergova, who as a child just before the war had been on the final train of the Kindertransport, a means of rescuing Jewish children from Czechoslovakia. The couple had a son and daughter.

After the end of hostilities, he briefly worked on the Manchester Guardian (1946-7) before joining the Daily Mirror, but was sacked at Christmas 1948. He then joined the News Chronicle. A one-time member of the Communist Party, he left it in 1951, and henceforward supported the Labour Party. A friend of Aneurin Bevan, whom he had first met in 1948 outside St Pancras Town Hall, Goodman gave support to Tribune, the newspaper Bevan had founded just before the war, and helped new staff writer Ian Aitken.

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