Ron Kaye, a longtime Los Angeles Daily News editor known for civically inspired muckraking and boosting the San Fernando Valley — including a failed bid for the Valley to secede from L.A. — has died. He was 83.
Kaye died early Friday at his home in Orange, Conn., his son, Alfred, confirmed to The Times. No cause of death was determined, although he’d been dealing with various age-related ailments.
After working for publications around the country and in Australia, Kaye arrived in Los Angeles and came into his own, beginning in 1985, as an editor at the Daily News — a scrappy, San Fernando Valley-based paper that prided itself on competing head-to-head with the L.A. Times in nuts-and-bolts coverage of police and local government, including City Hall and the school district.
“Ron was a passionate editor with a fierce competitive nature who loved nothing more than when one of his reporters beat that other paper in town on a story in their own backyard,” said Beth Shuster, vice president of content strategy at USC Communications. She worked as a Daily News reporter from 1986 until 1991.
“We knew that behind the brusque exterior was a man who genuinely cared about people, his adopted city and, more than anything, the newspaper business,” she said
In the 1990s, Kaye tapped into resentments some Valley residents felt about the services they received from Los Angeles City Hall and whether they should be associated with the big bureaucracy on the other side of the hills. Kaye ultimately became part of the story in his — and his paper’s — efforts to push for Valley secession, culminating in a 2002 citywide vote.
While the quest, if successful, would have benefited the Valley-based paper financially, Kaye firmly believed that the downtown bureaucracy was detached and neglectful.
“The Valley did not get — and still does not get — a ‘fair share’ of city services while paying an inordinate share of city taxes,” Kaye wrote in 2012, 10 years after voters cast ballots over whether to divide the city.
The measure narrowly passed in the San Fernando Valley, but it was crushed elsewhere in the city after a campaign in which opponents spent vastly more money.
Kaye rose to editor-in-chief but left the Daily News in 2008 after 23 years, frustrated with staff cutbacks and the paper’s out-of-town corporate leadership.
He also understood that journalism was facing ill tides.
“There just isn’t enough money in newspapers to allow for competition, even the pretense of competition,” Kaye wrote in a column in 2010. “One paper without competition can thrive for a good many years even in the face of the Internet and the lack of younger readers. Two or more cannot.”
Ronald Allen Kaye was born May 7, 1941, in Chicago to Rose Lasky and Al Kaye, a homemaker and a drapery salesman, who had emigrated from Russia and entered the country as Abraham Krakovsky, according to the family.
Kaye grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland and attained a degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1963 (he would later brag of graduating with the lowest GPA possible). His journalism career began at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but then he was drafted into the Army and posted in Alaska, serving from 1966 to 1968.
His first wife, Norma Kathryn Macleod, a teacher, died in 1987, leaving Kaye as the primary caregiver for his son, a role Alfred said his father embraced.
Kaye later married Deborah Reifman, the Daily News librarian.
Kaye’s politics were varying and sometimes evolving — which he described as radical centrism. At times, he sounded like a white middle-class, anti-government Valley conservative, but police misconduct toward people of color outraged him.
In a column after he left the Daily News, he described the early Los Angeles Police Department as “a crew of paid goons serving the interests of the rich and powerful who hired them to enforce the thin line between those who mattered and those who didn’t.”
His Daily News relentlessly covered the issues around the police beating of Rodney King and the Rampart police corruption scandal, winning sometimes grudging admiration from The Times.
At the Daily News, where he sometimes walked around the newsroom banging a cowbell, his outsized personality — sometimes bordering on bombast — fit the bill.
Journalist Sara Catania recalled her job interview, sitting in Kaye’s office, in 1995.
“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,” Catania wrote in a 2008 blog that she reposted after learning of Kaye’s death. “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.”
At the time, Catania had just left a junior reporter position at The Times in the Ventura County bureau.
“‘So, what do you say to that?’” she said Kaye demanded after his diatribe.
She replied that her coverage for The Times kicked the butt of the competing Daily News reporter on a regular basis.
Kaye laughed and offered her a job.
Kaye fumed when reporter Greg Gittrich told him of his intention to accept a full scholarship to Columbia University rather than continuing to deliver scoops on the scandal-plagued Belmont Learning Complex high school construction project.
“‘You don’t go to a fancy school to study journalism,’ he yelled,” Gittrich recalled in a post on Kaye’s Facebook page.
“This story could be once in a lifetime!” Kaye said to him. “This story is why people go to schools like Columbia — for a chance to cover something like this.”
Gittrich stayed and continued to do important work. Although he departed after 16 months, he never entirely left Kaye behind: “He was like a father to me.”
After leaving the Daily News, Kaye found a voice writing under his own byline for various publications and tried to organize grassroots coalitions to foster civic engagement. He moved to Connecticut in 2021 to be close to his son’s family.
In addition to his wife and son, Kaye is survived by two grandchildren.