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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Valley Voice

To begin to get a glimpse into the future of the Daily News of Los Angeles, one needs to understand Ron Kaye’s philosophy on journalism. And for the 64-year old editor of Los Angeles’ second largest daily newspaper, it all comes down to the story. For the last 20 years, it has been Kaye’s mission to chronicle the everyday struggles of the 1.4 million men and women that live in the San Fernando Valley. In his previous stint as managing editor, Kaye earned a reputation as an uncompromising voice that championed the causes of secession and the middle-class, while railing against a downtown bureaucracy, often seen as perpetually neglecting the Valley. In August, Kaye was named to replace David Butler in the paper’s top post and he said he plans to use his resources to continue to hold City Hall accountable, while attempting to illuminate the stories and truths of the Valley community. Question: What do you feel are the major issues that need to be addressed in the local business community? Answer: The most fundamental issue is the business climate of Los Angeles. We’re surrounded by cities that are thriving economically: Calabasas, Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Santa Clarita, Burbank, Glendale, all of which are centered around the Valley, and all of them have business climates that are healthier than Los Angeles.’ For the last 30 or 40 years, Los Angeles has gone after businesses, raising taxes while providing worse and worse services. The challenge as a newspaper is to define the issues, keep the feet of city hall on the fire and to stand for change. Clearly, the business climate is bad. The major companies have left and it’s hard to get good jobs in L.A. The mayor and the city council insist that it’s a new day and we’re waiting to see. The most obvious first step is to provide better services. They say they’re committed and it’s our job to make them fulfill their promises. Q: In the September 2002 issue of Los Angeles magazine, you were quoted as saying, “the wealth of the community is being taken downtown and stuffed into the pockets of public employees, influence peddlers, contractors, politicians and bureaucrats.” In this post-secession environment, do you feel this statement is still valid? And if so, how do you believe the Daily News can help to change this environment? A: It is still valid. Nothing has changed except city hall is under federal and district attorney investigations. Whether they lead to prosecutions or not, the fact is that there’s enough evidence to warrant elaborate two-year investigations. The election and defeat of a one-term mayor was symbolic of the public’s rejection of business as usual. We continue to pump money into downtown. There’s the Grand Avenue billion dollar fantasy and the Staples Center entertainment district and a hotel that the public is going to pay Hilton to operate for us with huge subsidies. They are all examples of building the downtown without re-payment. Q: The newspaper business as a whole has experienced a great deal of turbulence of late. In the most recent period, the Los Angeles Times registered its steepest circulation declines in 34 years, and many other newspapers registered similar declines. The Daily News on the other hand, registered a .09 percent increase. Why do you think this was, and how do you plan to sustain this growth? A: We have real support from the community from our Valley News and Green Sheet days. The Daily News is liked by the people in the Valley and the areas around it. We stand up for them and speak their language. It’s a very challenging time for everybody in the newspaper industry today. Newspapers have a unique set of problems. However, you’d be hard pressed to find very few industries in America that aren’t struggling right now. There are some fundamental changes taking place. Our challenge is to become more useful and more interesting. The Times’ situation is like most papers that have something like a monopoly or domination in a market. They have the most trouble, because they’re the most self-indulgent. Everyone here works for a living and they work hard every day. There are no illusions. We’re the smaller paper and we’re trying to enhance the value of our products to the public. It’s very challenging and like everybody in journalism we’re trying to reinvent what we do. Q: The Daily News is seen by many as being the voice of the Valley. What’s your vision for the paper and how it relates to the community? A: It’s about growing, enhancing and strengthening that voice. I’ve always believed what’s missing about newspapers is the journalism of everyday life. So much of what’s in papers is gothic and extraordinary. The challenge is to find the depths of everyday life. As an industry, we haven’t really evolved much in the last 50 years. We’ve taken the Columbia Journalism School of highfalutin overblown projects that can win Pulitzers, rather than paying attention to the lives of average Americans. A paper like the Daily News is about that. The Valley is about ordinary people. The challenge is what is the story and how to tell it and how do you get the skills to tell it. Q: How do you expect your tenure as editor will differ from David Butler’s? A: I would never have sought the job or been prepared for it without Dave Butler taking me to his graduate school of journalism. He is a brilliant editor in all facets. I’m much more content-oriented and story-oriented than he is. He educated everybody here and raised our overall skill level enormously. The most important thing we’re trying to do is liberate the creativity of journalists. All too often we’ve been strangled by the forms of mainstream newspapering. You have to respect those forms, but you don’t have to be enslaved by them. Q: Newspaper editors have been forced in recent years to do more with less. How do you plan to develop the Daily News with fewer resources than the paper has historically had? A: The first thing you have to do is stop whining about it. The second thing you have to do is get people out of the negative thinking that things are too hard. You have to seize the opportunity that is there. There is the opportunity to be creative and to find work that is meaningful. An editor is something like an orchestra conductor. It’s your job to bring out the talent in these talented people and bring them together. If you can make the environment more fun, personally rewarding and expressive and not fall into a cacophony of sound, you can make the paper better and people will stay longer and put more of their passion into their work. Q: You’ve said in the past that you see yourself as a watchdog for the middle class. With home prices skyrocketing and gasoline prices increasing dramatically, do you believe that the dream of reaching the middle class is becoming increasingly out of reach in the Valley? And if so, what can be done about it and how does the Daily News fit into the equation? A: If it had become a city, the Valley would’ve become the sixth largest city in America, as well as its richest and safest city. That’s an incredible thing for an area of 1.4 million people to be such an enormous enclave of middle class life. It’s now in peril. That’s the story I’ve carried for 20 years. It’s a story I didn’t know existed when I came to the Valley. We need to fight to create a better economic and business climate that creates well paying jobs, that encourages investment, that leads people to have the money to be able to afford those houses and provide stability. The Valley has changed my own political philosophy. America is in a profound political crisis at all levels. The middle class is silenced by the role of money and special interests on all sides. The answer is community organization. The communities need to take back their neighborhoods and from there, the cities, the states and the country. That’s what America needs: more democracy. Q: Michael Kinsley of the Los Angeles Times received his share of praise and his share of criticism for his experiments with blogs and wikitorials. What are your thoughts on this and do you see the Daily News experimenting with these forms of new media? A: I think experimentation is great. Whether they succeed or fail, we all can learn from those experiments and there’s no question that the future is heavily online for all forms of info. We all have to start experimenting in our own ways, putting resources into it and creating better and better online products that retain our readership and our advertisers and the ways to tell our story. Q: In recent years, the Los Angeles Times has made drastic cutbacks to its Valley edition, cutting staffers and vastly reducing its presence in the area. How do you view the Daily News’ competitive situation with them? A: We’re a very different product. We care passionately about all the communities that we serve and we care passionately about L.A. Forty percent of L.A. is in the Valley. To the Times, L.A. is a small place. They have a Valley edition when there are no Valley stories in it. They seem to endlessly circle the story of Los Angeles. Whereas, the story of Los Angeles in the greater sense, the Southern California sense, is our story and that’s what we think we can do as well or better than them. I wouldn’t play their game, that’s their job. Our issue is to play our game, which is to tell the story of our communities. Most days there’s not much overlap in circulation and we’re trying to tell a different story. I’m happy here.

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