Chris Godwin
By Andrew West
Delaware State News
DOVER — Eight days ago, the Delaware State News lost one of its own to cancer.
Chris Godwin, a copy editor with more than a decade of service to the newspaper, was 49.
All of us lost a friend, a guardian of the written word.
Not many readers would have been familiar with his name. Copy editors generally do not seek credit lines in the paper.
As he once told a group of students on a tour of the State News, “If you don’t know we exist, we’ve done our job.”
Over the past five months, Chris kept a blog about his personal battle with metastatic cancer, his reflections on family and friends and life, and more. For the purpose of this column, we will focus on his passion for the print.
In July, he fired off some thoughts on journalism in the wake of Walter Cronkite’s death.
“Just to fix this in time a bit,” Chris wrote, “Walter Cronkite died yesterday at 92. You had to be there to know what the guy meant. Back then, he seemed permanent. You could count on your fixtures remaining fixed for a good while.
“I was gratified to read, in one of the obituaries, that Walter himself believed that no television news broadcast could ever be a substitute for the printed version, in terms of fullness and depth of coverage. That’s still true, though nobody knows it (well, print people do, but who listens?) or believes it anymore. People would rather be shouted at by someone they already agree with.”
Chris’ newspaper career started when he was just 14 years old, using his stellar spelling and grammar skills to win a job as a copy boy in the Anchorage, Alaska, bureau of the Associated Press.
He was instantly hooked, just like four generations of his family had been on newspaper work. His parents, Connie and Stuart, both had newspaper jobs on their resumes.
Chris’ time in the news business pre-dated today’s quiet, computer-oriented newsroom. He could wield a pica pole and photo-sizing wheel with the same intensity that he turned pages of a dictionary and Associated Press stylebook.
The news business has evolved rapidly over the last two decades, thanks to the Internet and all of the electronic products that make it easy to grab news in bits and bytes. Chris studied online news and tried it. He liked it and loathed it.
“Forty years ago,” he wrote the day after Mr. Cronkite’s death, “who could foresee how the technology would change? That’s still sorting itself out. And when the last newspaper hits the last doorstep, something valuable will be lost.
“I’ve been at it a long time, and I can tell you that most people in a newsroom work very hard to make sure that the story you read in the paper is as truthful and accurate as we can possibly make it. Do we have opinions and biases and points of view? Of course. We’re human beings. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel a duty to check the facts, make sure stories don’t hit print with gaping holes and unanswered questions, make sure you’re getting the best information we can possibly give you while each day running smack into the constraints of time and manpower — constraints that are more severe than ever these days.
“A newspaper is what they call ephemera — short-lived printed matter,” Chris wrote. “Today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish. And that’s fine. Some of us like that. One of the things that has always attracted me to the job is just that — every day starts fresh, not a lot of work to take home, you bang out one day’s paper and that’s it. Tomorrow you do a whole new one. Good for teeny little attention spans like mine. But the way we go about it, from one day to the next, that doesn’t change. We really do put in some diligence. That’s the part that’s unseen and, I think, unknown and unappreciated.
“And it’s really the heart of the matter. So when that last newspaper hits that last doorstep, that’s what you’ll be losing. I think it’s hard to overestimate how valuable and important that is.”
Chris picked copy apart.
Writers, new or experienced, were given the same treatment. There’s no doubt he caught millions of mistakes and improved countless sentences over the years. Like a treasure hunter, he could find a gem of a quote or bit of detail buried in a story and move it to the top.
He would fire off a note or directly scold writers when they made simple errors. It would set him in a fit to see a real clunker, like the time one reporter said a judge ordered someone to “pay retribution to his employer.”
Chris also loved a snappy, witty headline. One of his best from the month of April, during his final days on job, was “Ion the prize” — a kicker on a story about Delaware State University’s hydrogen program.
He had quite a sense of humor, too. His irreverence once led him to slip a line into a story about a truck crash on Del. 1 a few years back. Chris’ second line in the news report read, “The good news for kids everywhere: The truck’s cargo of lima beans was a total loss.”
The week before the Cronkite piece, Chris was bemoaning the size of some of his favorite news magazines and marveling about how accessible they have become with computers and little electronic gizmos.
“Some of us older folks, say 40-plus, know what we’re losing (those of us who work for them especially); nobody under 30 does,” Chris wrote. “I like my gadgets, yes, and it’s nice to be able to read stuff when I’m lying in a hospital bed that, not that long ago, I’d have had to go to a newsstand or a library to get my hands on — and now it comes to me.
“But there’s still something to be said for holding the thing itself in your hand, a reassurance in quarter-folding the page and knocking out the crossword puzzle, in lingering over a well-turned phrase. Somehow not the same on a very groovy iPod or any other device; it just doesn’t lend itself to that. And what are you going to line your birdcages and gerbil cages with when all the papers and magazines are gone, huh?
“First time I ever set foot in a newspaper office, man, I just knew. And I’ve been pretty fortunate to be able to do the thing I’ve always loved best for most of the time since then. I still think it matters.”
This is a song Dave wrote during a long walk one day after Mark and I had returned from our last visit with Chris. His friend Scott Cochran of the band Flannel (
Christian Godwin – baltimoresun.com
