Ron Kaye, a longtime Los Angeles Every day Information editor recognized for civically impressed muckraking and boosting the San Fernando Valley — together with a failed bid for the Valley to secede from L.A. — has died. He was 83.
Kaye died early Friday at his house in Orange, Conn., his son, Alfred, confirmed to The Instances. No reason behind dying was decided, though he’d been coping with numerous age-related illnesses.
After working for publications across the nation and in Australia, Kaye arrived in Los Angeles and got here into his personal, starting in 1985, as an editor on the Every day Information — a scrappy, San Fernando Valley-based paper that prided itself on competing head-to-head with the L.A. Instances in nuts-and-bolts protection of police and native authorities, together with Metropolis Corridor and the college district.
“Ron was a passionate editor with a fierce aggressive nature who cherished nothing greater than when one in every of his reporters beat that different paper on the town on a narrative in their very own yard,” mentioned Beth Shuster, vp of content material technique at USC Communications. She labored as a Every day Information reporter from 1986 till 1991.
“We knew that behind the brusque exterior was a person who genuinely cared about folks, his adopted metropolis and, greater than something, the newspaper enterprise,” she mentioned
Within the Nineties, Kaye tapped into resentments some Valley residents felt concerning the providers they obtained from Los Angeles Metropolis Corridor and whether or not they need to be related to the massive paperwork on the opposite facet of the hills. Kaye finally turned a part of the story in his — and his paper’s — efforts to push for Valley secession, culminating in a 2002 citywide vote.
Whereas the search, if profitable, would have benefited the Valley-based paper financially, Kaye firmly believed that the downtown paperwork was indifferent and neglectful.
“The Valley didn’t get — and nonetheless doesn’t get — a ‘fair proportion’ of metropolis providers whereas paying an inordinate share of metropolis taxes,” Kaye wrote in 2012, 10 years after voters solid ballots over whether or not to divide the town.
The measure narrowly handed within the San Fernando Valley, nevertheless it was crushed elsewhere within the metropolis after a marketing campaign during which opponents spent vastly more cash.
Kaye rose to editor-in-chief however left the Every day Information in 2008 after 23 years, pissed off with employees cutbacks and the paper’s out-of-town company management.
He additionally understood that journalism was dealing with in poor health tides.
“There simply isn’t sufficient cash in newspapers to permit for competitors, even the pretense of competitors,” Kaye wrote in a column in 2010. “One paper with out competitors can thrive for an excellent a few years even within the face of the Web and the dearth of youthful readers. Two or extra can not.”
Ronald Allen Kaye was born Could 7, 1941, in Chicago to Rose Lasky and Al Kaye, a homemaker and a material salesman, who had emigrated from Russia and entered the nation as Abraham Krakovsky, based on the household.
Kaye grew up within the suburbs of Cleveland and attained a level in anthropology on the College of Chicago in 1963 (he would later brag of graduating with the bottom GPA potential). His journalism profession started on the Cleveland Plain Seller, however then he was drafted into the Military and posted in Alaska, serving from 1966 to 1968.
His first spouse, Norma Kathryn Macleod, a trainer, died in 1987, leaving Kaye as the first caregiver for his son, a task Alfred mentioned his father embraced.
Kaye later married Deborah Reifman, the Every day Information librarian.
Kaye’s politics have been various and generally evolving — which he described as radical centrism. At instances, he seemed like a white middle-class, anti-government Valley conservative, however police misconduct towards folks of colour outraged him.
In a column after he left the Every day Information, he described the early Los Angeles Police Division as “a crew of paid goons serving the pursuits of the wealthy and highly effective who employed them to implement the skinny line between those that mattered and people who didn’t.”
His Every day Information relentlessly coated the problems across the police beating of Rodney King and the Rampart police corruption scandal, profitable generally grudging admiration from The Instances.
On the Every day Information, the place he generally walked across the newsroom banging a cowbell, his outsized persona — generally bordering on bombast — match the invoice.
Journalist Sara Catania recalled her job interview, sitting in Kaye’s workplace, in 1995.
“I heard for the primary time what I got here to contemplate his ten-minute stump speech on the vanity of The Instances, its self-aggrandizement, its laziness,” Catania wrote in a 2008 weblog that she reposted after studying of Kaye’s dying. “These have been pre-blogging, pre-Web, pre-everybody’s-got-an-opinion-worth-hearing days. I’d by no means heard anybody communicate with such blanket disregard for The Instances, and it was nice, forbidden enjoyable.”
On the time, Catania had simply left a junior reporter place at The Instances within the Ventura County bureau.
“‘So, what do you say to that?’” she mentioned Kaye demanded after his diatribe.
She replied that her protection for The Instances kicked the butt of the competing Every day Information reporter regularly.
Kaye laughed and supplied her a job.
Kaye fumed when reporter Greg Gittrich advised him of his intention to simply accept a full scholarship to Columbia College quite than persevering with to ship scoops on the scandal-plagued Belmont Studying Advanced highschool development challenge.
“‘You don’t go to a flowery college to check journalism,’ he yelled,” Gittrich recalled in a put up on Kaye’s Fb web page.
“This story might be as soon as in a lifetime!” Kaye mentioned to him. “This story is why folks go to varsities like Columbia — for an opportunity to cowl one thing like this.”
Gittrich stayed and continued to do vital work. Though he departed after 16 months, he by no means completely left Kaye behind: “He was like a father to me.”
After leaving the Every day Information, Kaye discovered a voice writing below his personal byline for numerous publications and tried to prepare grassroots coalitions to foster civic engagement. He moved to Connecticut in 2021 to be near his son’s household.
Along with his spouse and son, Kaye is survived by two grandchildren.
