In case anyone was curious, former Times Leader managing editor Dave Iseman is now listed as the assistant managing editor of the News-Leader of Springfield, Mo., a Gannett paper with a daily circulation of 61,000.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Iseman's title in the Ozarks: Assistant Managing Editor
In case anyone was curious, former Times Leader managing editor Dave Iseman is now listed as the assistant managing editor of the News-Leader of Springfield, Mo., a Gannett paper with a daily circulation of 61,000.
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61 comments:
dude, read your own site more often. This was clarified back in April and you posted the update yourself.
Sheesh.
How great is life since that douchebag bit the dust
Good point, 11:39. Sorry.
Bit the dust, he's at a bigger paper now? FYI: There is a world beyond WB
7:46 must be one of the reporters who couldn't hack it. I guess if iseman was too tough for you, you're probably not working at a newspaper anymore. At least not a daily.
I really don't see the point to this post. So Iseman landed another job? he was bound to sooner or later.
We're better off without him but good luck to him. Maybe Springfield is ripe for sayso.
Maybe he can get his old pal Walzer a job there, too. Al and Dave reborn in the Bible belt. Love it, love it, love it.
9:42: If the person isn't working at a newspaper anymore, he or she is then definitely smarter than you. Getting a college degree and working at a newspaper is like getting a degree and deciding to work at Wal-Mart. Same pay, probably even shittier hours.
First of all, if you haven't noticed, the TL is way worse since Iseman left -- and so is the entire news market for that matter. Because after he helped create a good story, the CV would eventually jump on.
He's a great news man and way too talented to be in W-B. Also, anyone who compares newspaper salaries to Wal-Mart salaries is either clueless or a really crappy journalist. People in the W-B market get so wrapped up in their little world. There are other, much better newspapers out there in places much more desirable where you can earn a lot more money.
The paper is much better without him.
I've never worked with him, but I heard he'd put people through hell just so he can fire their ass.
Lady Bird died.
Everyone keep her in your prayers.
There's no doubt that Iseman could be tough to work for, but the fact is he is a great hard news person. He did get stories in the paper that other would let go. He gave the paper direction and helped develop a style. People might not have liked it, but they knew the TL would dig into stories. Reading the paper now, occassionally online, it's getting hard to tell it apart from the voice. The Tl of course looks much better, but content..
Lady Bird,
What a great 3-point shooter he was. I loved the Celtics growing up.
Iseman is a great newsman and better editor. The only problem he has is that he actually makes reporters work. Wah Wah Wah!!!!!
So I watched "The Last King of Scotland" tonight. It's the Forest Whitaker movie about Idi Amin, the crazy Ugandan dictator who oversaw the death of 300,000 of his countrymen.
You Iseman fanboys out there aren't going to like this, but more than once Amin's "freewheeling dementia" (as one review put it) reminded me of Iseman. Like Iseman, Amin was charismatic and a powerful leader. Also like Iseman, Amin was insane, a destructive and malevolent insanity that ultimately destroyed everything it touched.
Iseman enjoyed the thrill of a news story and sticking his thumb in the eye of power, but you could count on one hand the number of stories he oversaw that had a genuine and lasting impact. You could also count on one hand (less than one hand?) the reporters he successfully mentored to "the next level," major market dailies.
Like Amin, Iseman at times was impossible not to like. That doesn't mean he wasn't ultimately a destructive influence.
Iseman was certainly a good newsman, tough and aggressive. But if he didn't like you, it didn't matter what you did, he was nasty and sneaky as hell. Just like Walzer in many ways. In fact, he was the male Walzer. The only difference was he was a good family parent and he was nice to your face even if he was stabbing you in the back.
Iseman was/is a hell of a news guy, but he needed a boss or a trusted assistant to buffer his excesses. Personally, he and Walzer were too much alike -- although he was 10 times the editor she was. But they fed each other's worst impulses, and every newsroom needs a calm "voice of reason." Neither one could stop the other from going overboard.
John Mitchell... great points. I think that voice of reason was Chris Ritchie. When he left, the calming influence was gone.
The bottom line was Iseman was a guy, but he acted like a female. It wasn't that his reporters were whining about hard work, it's that he'd ask the impossible of them and get bitchy when they couldn't deliver or when a story wouldn't pan out. Remember how crazy and wild-eyed he'd get during flood times when he'd show up hair all frizzy and wearin' that beat up tank top? The guy was a maniac. Actually, I think Walzer kept the restraints on him in a way. He really went off the deeep end after her departure, and there was no one there to keep him reeled in. Certainly not Golas or Joe B.
Iseman was a good news guy because he could get really excited about pursuing a hard-to-get story that would make a stir and make the CV look lazy. But he had many, many cockamamie ideas. A dog that reported on nepotism? One hundred some weekly column inches devoted to racism and anonymous libel? Making reporters follow up on this anonymous slander no matter how baseless it was?
And he had a pain-in-the-ass personality. He could be chummy and fun and good guy for drinking beer with, but he was also a micromanaging bully who never trusted a reporter to be intelligent enough to handle a story on his own. His management philosophy consisted of threatening and belittling people until they were too scared or too tired to push back.
I hope the paper in Missouri can use his talents and rein in his excesses. But from what I saw, his tenacity as a journalist was outweighed by his questionable news judgement as an editor and his awful skills as a manager.
Wow, he sounds a lot like Hothead Ed in Scranton, at least in terms of emotional stability. I never heard anyone credit Ed with having good journalism chops, though.
3:26 - you sound like one of the reporters who couldn't get the story. (that's not something I would be proud of). Didn't the TL win a couple state awards for that "wild-eyed, crazy" flood coverage?
A lot of good points on here about Iseman, pro and con, but I wonder if he's really important enough to generate this much deep thought.
That said ... my two cents is that Iseman and Walzer were two heads of the same warped coin, quasijournalistic nimrods with a fairly good nose for news who ultimately fell prey to their own hubris and the weird notion that merely working in journalism somehow justified their self-righteous superiority complexes.
To whit: Walzer is unemployed and Iseman is underemployed at a hack paper in a hick town, overseeing saturation coverage of rubber-chicken dinners and demolition derbies. A pox on both of them.
Veterans of NE PA journalism will remember that the heart got sucked out of the Times Leader the second Cliff Schechtman carried the paper's reputation for integrity and relentlessness out the door with him. The TL was never the same, no matter how many cutesy SAYSO gimmicks or overblown attempts at "investigative journalism" that Iseman and Walzer cooked up.
10:29
Bravo, Bravo, Bravo
Whoever is bringing up the issue of the TL winning awards is missing the point, totally. Yes, he was a good news guy. It's been said over and over. It was just hard to work with his pig-headed ways and his Walzer-like attitude.
You're right. Let's end this. We're moving on without him. Hopefully, a Cliff-like persona will emerge as the TL tries to emerge after the reign of terror under Walzer the Wicked and Iseman the Awful.
Point of order: No one, and I mean NO ONE, living and working in Wilkes-Barre or nearly anywhere else in NE PA is in a position to call another city a "hick town."
Except Springfield.
10:29, your phrasing and sentence construction bears an uncanny resemblence to a certain department editor at the TL. Your love of archaeic phrases such as "to wit" and your wordy, cliche-ridden prose give you away.
I think 10:29 is no longer at the TL. No one who is left there even remembers Cliff, do they?
Who cares who is writing what, Isemen? Get on with your life. We all have an idea who is writing what here. The point is who cares?
9:03, if we all have an idea, start outing some names
Iseman and Ed Christine? No comparison, NFW. Iseman was the better editor -- Christine was barely an editor, as defined in the dictionary. Christine was also the bigger fuxxing idiot by a factor of 110. You could work with Iseman, most of the time, and he actually contributed something positive, most of the time.
Why out them? Who cares?
First of all, to the poster who compared working in print journalism to working at Wal-Mart: we don't do it for the money. With the exception of a few bad eggs, most of us toil away working for newspapers because we actually care about our communities, and our readers, and want to help in whatever humble ways we can to make both better.
Secondly, I agree that comparing Iseman to Ed Christine is just ridiculous. For all his faults, and every human being has them, Iseman cared about good journalism, was passionate about making sure the newspaper served as a watchdog for the people and cared about making the TL better. Ed? I don't know what he cared about or felt passionately about, but it wasn't good, proactive journalism and it wasn't the betterment of the TT.
"With the exception of a few bad eggs, most of us toil away working for newspapers because we actually care about our communities, and our readers, and want to help in whatever humble ways we can to make both better."
Why is it that journalists rarely suspect the same of politicians?
1:41, there is such a thing as fair compensation, and you can't tell me that journalists don't deserve it simply because they stand guard of society's fourth estate. Newspapers have exploited their workers for centuries. And as much as you can work for one and love what you do, you can also find that passion in other ways without having to commit your life to earning the something on par with a Wal-Mart stock boy's salary.
"Why is it that journalists rarely suspect the same of politicians?"
Whether we do, or not, that's a matter of personal opinion. Being suspicious of politicians to the point that we investigate what they do and question what they say and, well that's just us doing our jobs.
It's not so much as being suspicious but just wanting to hold them accountable.
I don't think anyone is "suspicious" of a person just because he's a politician. We become suspicious when they are not open with us.
I work in journalism and make $60,000. How is that low paying?
Who was dumping on the Ozarks, calling them the asshole of the world?
NEPA is the Ozarks of Pennsylvania, with polka instead of country musik.
The Times Leader NEEDS Walzer and Iseman back. They were truly heros at the Times Leader. All the rest of you employees are/were totally worthless. Your columns absolutely suck, thats why you see more and more people reading the Voice. They have the creativity of a retard. Infact I won't even touch a copy of the Times Leader for fear that your retardedness will seep into my skin causing me to drool uncontrollably and write bad columns.
10:22 is sooooooo funny. Iseman and Walzer were heroes but in their own minds.
I work in journalism and make $60,000. How is that low paying?
I was 10:29 way back when.
I no longer work in NEPA so I absolutely get to call Wilkes-Barre a hick city.
And my prose is not wordy.
Damn it.
Yeah, but you gotta admit, "to wit" is a terribly archaeic phrase
It sounds like something a high schooler would say if they were trying to emulate Shakespeare or Hemmingway in an essay
Of course, as some posters noted, it's "to wit" and not "to whit." Unless you work at the Voice.
And I can't believe that I'm getting drawn into this, but I would argue that Springfield, Mo. -- I've been there -- is demonstrably more of a hick town than Wilkes-Barre. Wilkes-Barre is part of a MSA that includes Scranton and Hazleton and totals 550,000. Springfield is part of an MSA that total's 407,000. Wilkes-Barre is two hours from New York and from Philly, and have a lot of ties to both places. Springfield is more than three hours from the closest big city, Kansas City, Mo. Wilkes-Barre is insane in the same way Iseman is. I don't know how insane they are in the Ozarks, but the lead story today was the city public-works department getting ready for winter weather later this year. Just the paper to hire a "great news guy."
OK then, I'll give you the "to whit" points - that it should be "wit" and that it is a little old-old-school. The rest of the post, though, was a splendid exhibition of editorial verisimilitude. Admit it.
And how about that News-Leader? Today's reader poll: Did you know used fry grease sells for about 15 cents a pound and that there are people willing to steal the stuff from restaurants in the Ozarks?
Your options to respond to the poll are:
You're kidding, right?
Some people will steal anything
Couple of points:
First, on the to wit thing: It's a horribly antiquated literary phrase that TL editors seem to adore, but it hardly sounds natural at all. Just analyze its Olde English or Germanic roots and realize that good righting is supposed to sound natural, conversational, not like something from centuries ago or something out of an academic journal. To wit is probably the most abominable phrase I've ever seen used in print media, but the TL seems to have an unexplainable affection for it. I just don't get it. Don't you understand none of your readers talk like that and to them it sounds hoity toity, at best.
Secondly, on Iseman. People say "I wonder if we should be talking about Iseman this much, if he's worth this much though." Obviously he is. Every time his name is mentioned or every time that picture pops up on this board, the postings grow like wild fire. He is worth discussing and ruminating because he essentially was part of the TL regime for a long time and affected a lot of people's lives during that time, for the bad and the good, I guess. To ignore his tenure or to not dissect and analyze his reign will never help people realize what strides or lack of strides the paper has made and then it will never move on.
TL's top stories today:
Protect and serve a way of life
HANOVER TWP. – It was March 1967 when then rookie police officer William Howatt investigated his first case for the township’s police department.
A special friend in pastry chef’s corner
BLOOMSBURG – Hazleton’s Jen Yemola had two weeks between when she found out she was going to be a contestant on Fox’s “Hell’s Kitchen” and when she was to fly out to Los Angeles.
Go get 'em, big boys.
Wait a minute ...
somebody who uses the expression "hoity-toity" which has its roots in the 16th freakin' century (according to snopes.com) is going to lecture me about "to wit."?
12:36, you must work at the Times Leader yourself.
My dearest hippopotamus, if you look back at my post, you'd see my exact words were: "Don't you understand none of your readers talk like that and to them it sounds hoity toity, at best."
You see, hoity toity, just like to wit, is not a part of my daily diction, nor is it a part of the readers'. I was simply using it to express the point of how ridiculous that phrase seems to those who read it. "Why yes, Stewart, I think the piece is quite hoity toity, oh and would you refill me a spot of tea."
Why yes, Miss Lansbury, I'd be happy to offer you more tea. It's very easy to do. To wit: I pour, like this
I read the TL all the time and never see the words "to wit" in there. What the hell are you talking about? And, to 1:57, obviously you can't read because the story on the Hanover cop was on page 3, the Hell's Kitchen story was inside the paper, too. So, where in the world did you get the idea that they were top stories? If you caught them on the website, its because they keep rotating them.
A search for "to wit" in the TL archives failed because the paper's super-retarded Web site automatically returns stories that include words that are somewhat similar to the search term, to wit: witness.
Maybe a TLer with access to the library could do a search and post the results here. The phrase -- which appears as boilerplate language in many court filings -- didn't strike me as appearing frequently in the paper.
Of course, Wilkes-Barre is a town that calls its clerk of court a prothonotary, so maybe readers enjoy it.
Wilkes-Barre doesn't have a clerk of courts or a prothonotary. Luzerne County does. And they call their clerk of courts a clerk of courts. Prothonotary is a different office. Learned that from my short but memorable stint WB.
Thanks 9:12 for your explanation. I'll go one further. Philaldelphia and Allegeny counties have a prothonotary, too. Does that make them archaic as well? Get your facts straight.
Since the comments are about Iseman, shouldn't we be using the more appropriate contraction: "t'wit."
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