Goodman graduated from
Reed College in 1989. His newspaper career started in
Kyoto writing for the Japan Times before he became a freelancing Southeast Asia correspondent for a number of newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald and London's Daily Telegraph. He returned to the US in 1993 writing for the Anchorage Daily News covering, among others, early on the career of
Sarah Palin. After getting a master's degree in Asian studies at the
University of California, Berkeley he came to The Washington Post in 1999. As the Post's economic correspondent, he undertook extensive travels to Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa, Australia, and Europe. In 2007, he joined The New York Times as a national correspondent and wrote about the
financial crisis of 2008. A major contribution, The Reckoning, was a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize and received a
Gerald Loeb Award[4] in 2009 for Large Newspapers. He received another Gerald Loeb Award in 2014 for Commentary.[5]
In his book Past Due, Goodman analyzes the lot of the U.S. worker who finds that his/her financial situation has not been improved over the last 15 years, namely “(b)y the fall of 2008, most American workers were bringing home roughly the same weekly wages they had earned in 1983, after accounting for inflation."
[6]
His move from a respected position at a major traditional newspaper to the web-based The Huffington Post was noted.
Howard Kurtz wrote that Goodman indicated that at The New York Times he found himself engaged in "almost a process of laundering my own views, through the tried-and-true technique of dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader."[7]
Books
Goodman, PS: Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy (Times Books, 2009), selected as an Editor's Choice title by the New York Times Book Review and as one of Bloomberg's Top 50 Business Books.
Davos man: how the billionnaires devoured the world, Custom house, 2022.