Ron Kaye: How Green Was My Valley
An Appreciation
First published on my blog in April of 2008 on a platform that no longer exists. Retrieved via the Wayback Machine. It’s precious because it captures both Ron and a no-longer extant moment in 1990s LA journalism — warts and all — that was formative for me. Reposting in honor of Ron, who passed away on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024. (Added: I just unearthed Ron’s response to my post, written shortly after it published back in April of 2008. Read through to the end to see it.)
“The LA Times is one of the worst things that ever happened to this city, and to journalism.”
Words to that effect, many of them unprintable here, flowed unchecked from the mouth of Ron Kaye.
It was the spring of 1995 and I was sitting in Ron’s office at the LA Daily News in Woodland Hills, where he was managing editor. I was there looking for a job, having just been canned by the Times.
Or, more precisely, not asked to stay at the end of a three-year run in the Ventura County bureau that started with an internship, segued into a full-time “freelancing” gig and ended with a two-year temporary staff job. I needed more “seasoning,” I was informed by the editor of the edition, who later scolded me for acting “too cheerful” upon learning the news.
Of course I was disappointed to have been let go– it was the Los Angeles Times, after all. But disappointment was tempered by giddy relief. I had witnessed the slow decay of bureau staff writers as they waited, endlessly, for the magical anointing that would whisk them “downtown,” meanwhile indentured to a despotic managing editor who’d reportedly been exiled to the ‘burbs for bad behavior and who routinely inflicted his own misery on his minions, landing at least one of my colleagues in therapy and causing the rest of us needless hours of anguish. Once shown the door I was happy to go.
Sitting in Ron Kaye’s office, I heard for the first time what I came to consider his ten-minute stump speech on the arrogance of the Times, its self-aggrandizement, its laziness. He abhorred all these things about it, stood in opposition to them. Those were pre-blogging, pre-Internet, pre-everybody’s-got-an-opinion-worth-hearing days. I’d never heard anyone speak with such blanket disregard for the Times, and it was great, forbidden fun.
Ron was steeped in the humor of it all. He sat at his desk, growling behind sunglasses, his dark, grey-tinged hair spinning off at wild angles. On the wall behind him were a series of framed photographs of chimpanzees aping See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil. I later learned that the glasses were an eye ailment palliative, but no explanation was offered on that day and the effect was dramatic and rather grand. They added to his mystique, his irreverent cool guy-ness.
At the end of his rant, which included a takedown of most of the Times’ front-page writers, with a particular emphasis on the paper’s “piss-poor” coverage of the LAPD, Ron abruptly stopped.
“So, what do you say to that?” he demanded, folding his arms and regarding me with the disdain I clearly deserved as one of the throng of Times no-goodniks.
In those days the paper media were at war for domination of Southern California. Ventura County was viewed as a major source of ad revenue, prompting a geyser of resources. In addition to the local newspaper, three outsiders had bureaus in Simi Valley, a town with a population smaller than Pasadena’s. I had been the Times’ Simi Valley reporter. The Daily News had someone there too.
“Well,” I said, “if you read the Times’ Simi Valley coverage you would know that I kicked butt on the Daily News on a regular basis.”
Ron laughed. “Touche,” he said. “We need to work on our coverage out there.”
He offered me a job, which I happily accepted. My year at the Daily News was, by and large, a great experience, balm for my time at the Times, due in no small part to Ron. He was often gruff but never mean. He was loyal to his reporters, respectful but not fawning. He would stroll through the newsroom at any hour of the day, belting out “My Way,” or “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and peering over reporters’ shoulders, reading ledes out loud and offering ad hoc critiques.
He was collegial in the truest sense of the word, well read and intellectually curious, ready to discuss philosophy, faith, politics, cooking, sports, the stock market or anything else that came up. When my husband and I moved to Silver Lake and threw a housewarming party, we invited the entire Daily News staff, including Ron. He not only showed up but stayed late, as comfortable outside of the newsroom as he was in it.
For me, to be a big fish in a small pond was a wonderful thing. At the Times an underling like me would be lucky to get a tag line on a big story as part of the “swarm” — the inevitable overstaffing the Times marshaled for big news events, as much to intimidate the competition as to provide thorough coverage. I was grateful to be offered the occasional fence-painting privilege of working the weekend night shift downtown, which consisted of monitoring the evening news shows and rewriting wire copy.
At the Daily News, scrappy was the rule of the day. The paper did not begin to have the staff to swarm anything. One story, one reporter meant I was given free rein. I profiled Tom Hayden, Henry Waxman and Sister Helen Prejean. I covered Colin Powell and Jesse Jackson, as well as the Chris Darden meltdown after the OJ verdict, sitting next to Maria Shriver, then working for NBC, who draped her Armani suit jacket over the back of her chair, next to my Ross Dress for Less cardigan.
If the Los Angeles Times of that era was classical music, with all its constricting hoity-toityness, and the LA Weekly the wildly veering, by turns brilliant and self-destructive incarnation of punk rock, Ron Kaye’s Daily News was rock and roll — direct, soulful and pragmatic.
After being treated like a second-class citizen at the Times, it was both thrilling and absurd to be at a paper that, through Ron Kaye, transformed its second-class citizen-ness into its raison d’etre. My tenure at the Daily News came at the beginning of the secession dance, when the paper first began pushing the idea of the Valley breaking off from the rest of LA, and I wrote the first major piece on it, a sort of statistical tease of just what this new city might be like. Sometimes I wasn’t sure how seriously to take it all. Could this be for real, this quest for separateness? Did anyone really think it would be good for the Valley to be on its own?
The fundamental conservatism of the community that supported the Daily News, if not the paper itself, left me feeling that it wasn’t simply a desire to be heard that lay at the root of the secession drive, but a wish to sever itself from the urban complexities that defined Los Angeles. The paper in those days was very much a good old boys operation. All the top editors, all the columnists, all the decision-makers and agenda-setters, were white and male.
One upside of the Daily News’ “don’t take any of this too seriously” mentality meant that everyone went home by 6, which was also a major downside. Stories that were too long were simply lopped off, sometimes mid-sentence. The penny pinching endemic to paper news operations today was rampant at the Daily News even then. Staffers were made to pay for their parking — on the company lot. Basic supplies such as pens and notebooks were locked up and doled out one at a time. If ever you wished to improve your writing and reporting by attending a conference, you paid your own way. Near the end of my year at the Daily News I was assigned to cover the 1996 Republican Presidential Convention in San Diego. I was crendentialed and ready to go when the powers that be decided the trip was too expensive — even after I offered to spring for gas and stay with friends.
I left for the LA Weekly soon after. Ron was more than a little put out. “That rag! What a waste of talent!” he rumbled, then added: “Come back any time.”
As much as the Daily News needed the LA Times in those days, as much as its oppositional existence depended on it, the Times needed the Daily News even more. Though the Daily News had nothing near the Times’ staff and resources, it broke stories and poked holes in the Times’ reporting often enough to inject at least a modicum of humility into the Times’ bloated sense of self-worth.
Ron Kaye’s departure from the Daily News on Friday, coming, according to news accounts, amidst his ongoing battle to salvage staff and resources, could not have happened at a worse moment for the Daily News, the city and for the news business as a whole.
In this era of Zellian staff slashing and kowtowing to the innovation panacea (it’s a means, not an end, guys) the Daily News needs Ron Kaye, and Los Angeles needs the Daily News — Ron Kaye’s Daily News — more than ever. Fearless, on the ground reporting in communities that are otherwise ignored. Coverage of LA that does not stand on ceremony. Basic human decency and good editing instincts. Come back, Ron Kaye.
Here’s Ron’s email response to me, which came shortly after I the piece was published:
Rumors reached me from New York this afternoon that you had blogged a remembrance of me that I should catch up with and then a little while ago your email crossed back across the country and was sent to me.
I read it out loud to Deborah in my best Ron Kaye voice but it cracked when I got to the tabline and she had to say come back Ron Kaye.
It was deeply touching and only a real writer could so embellish a character to make him for more interesting than he is in real life while staying true to his natural absurdity. Thank you.
You’ll like this, when I went in Sunday for the last time to dump the rubble of paper and junk in a squadron of giant garbage cans I loaded up a carton with my keepsakes and looked around at the front pages on the wall and took one as a sourvenir of my time/ What if the Valley were THE CITY…
It wasn’t until I read your blog that I realized who wrote it and remembered how badly I wanted that story, and was probably abusive in trying to get it since you were the only one who could have written it.
It was indeed the beginning of the closest thing L.A. has had to a conversation about what kind of city it could be, would be, might even still become.
It’s funny really. I drew the line six months ago or so that they would have to carry me out or throw me out and if I hadn’t publicly made the remark so often I would have given in and walked away as they wanted.
But this is better, forces me into a confrontation with myself over what I lived in fear for a good part of time at the Daily News, being fired and having nowhere to turn because I’d burned so many bridges in the past.
I still rail against the Times and did so recently at the Herald-Examiner reunion and tribute to the great editori Jim Bellows, called the Times criminal for its neglect of its civic duty to fight for a greater city. And somehow I know that doing something to make L.A. the great city it should is still my calling as I begin to get in touch with the person I am free of Daily News role.
It is liberating to have the chance to have been in a cocoon for so long and to suddenly emerge to a world full of possibility and unpredictability. I know for sure I’m no butterfly but I feel stronger inside than I ever.
I have no clue about what happens next but for the first time in my life I’m not afraid, have nothing to lose, and don’t even want anything except to live each as it comes.
I hope you will stay in touch. These are exciting times, I see the climax of history coming, not in an apocalypitc way but as a playing out of the drama where the choices we make individually and collectively really matter. I’m sure somehow the circumstances of my leaving the Daily News have helped propel me forward.
I’m sure we will meet again, cheers Ron
