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He shook hands with Superman, wove a discarded City Hall rug into a tale of political cronyism, and created a local anonymous comment system long before Facebook made it a thing. He died last week after a fight with leukemia, and journalism is diminished.

Dave Iseman swirled into Luzerne County like a whirling little wind eddy on a sunny spring day, the kind that you don’t notice until it tips a half-full coffee cup next to you on the park bench, or snatches a shopping list from your fingertips.

From his first days working for the Times Leader in 1995, Iseman both irritated and enlivened the world of local news with an off-kilter wit that, like the proverbial velvet glove, masked a no-holds-barred journalistic fist. Ask any reporter who worked under his editorial tutelage here and you will almost certainly get the same answer: He infuriated, and he taught everything that came to matter most in their careers.

Iseman launched the now-defunct SaySo feature in the Times Leader, first in the section delivered only in Hazleton, where he was initially the bureau editor, then to the paper at large: A dedicated phone line answered by a machine that recorded reader comments for someone to transcribe and someone else to edit for print. It often became a weapon to launch political or ad hominem attacks, but it also unleashed a trove of legitimate news tips and gauged the mood of many who otherwise sat silent.

“It’s just people talking,” he justified.

When then-Hazleton Mayor Mike Marsicano ripped a rug out while creating a “mayor’s office that looks like a mayor’s office,” Iseman — in a move that epitomized his style — convinced a reporter to join in retrieving it from a dumpster. He spread the carpet in a vacant area of the TL’s former Hazleton Bureau and wrote about the good shape it was in, then ordered reporters to scrutinize the bills for the renovations. That review revealed Marsicano was doing what many would call “Piecemealing,” breaking a large renovation project into smaller jobs. The state requires work that costs more than a set threshold to be awarded through a sealed bid process; breaking the work into smaller jobs avoids that threshold and lets you hire cronies on the taxpayer’s dime

And yes, Iseman appeared in Action Comics 567 as a reporter meeting Superman and Lois Lane. He earned the honor when, as a real reporter for the Bloomsburg Press Enterprise covering the mine fire of Centralia, he tracked down Bob Rozakis, the writer of Action Comics 558 in which Superman saved “Coaltown” from an underground mine fire. You can read a detailed account by Iseman at daveiseman.com, but the search for the out-of-country author in the pre-cell phone era tells you everything you need to know about Iseman’s doggedness:

“I had to: 1) find someone who knew where he was; 2) find someone else who happened to be with him and wore a pager; 3) hope that person gave Rozakis a message to call me back; and 4) hope for that crucial call-back.

Surprisingly, that all worked. I scrambled a lot like that when I was a reporter. Make a bunch of calls, throw out the net, drop a lot of lines in the water, hope for a bite.”

For a decade, Dave Iseman mentored local reporters, helped craft stories into compelling and honest narratives, shared his wit and family foibles in weekly columns, and blazed an unflinching beacon on the most basic tenet of news reporting, described succinctly in a 2006 column.

“Do the journalism. Don’t think fallout. No sacred cows.”

Godspeed, David Mark Iseman, and thank you.

Iseman
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