That's coming from Paul Oberjuerge, who lost his job as a sports columnist in the recent putsch so may not be the most objective observer. But he also worked for the Los Angeles News Group for a long time and knows the players well. Kaye is expected to be formally replaced as Daily News editor tomorrow. Oberjuerge blogs:

I never met the man. Never even spoke to him. But as a sports columnist for an L.A. News Group newspaper, my stuff was getting into Kaye’s newspaper with some regularity during his tenure. I often looked at the Daily News website and appreciated that the newspaper still seemed to have some fight left in it, that there still appeared to be some intelligent design behind it....

Kaye seemed to believe that LADN mattered, that it represented a large, often overlooked constituency (the San Fernando Valley) and that it provided a real service to the greater L.A. area as the last, most-coherent alternative to the L.A. Times. But that’s a downright subversive mindset in the MediaNews gulag.

Even as the LANG meltdown picked up speed, Kaye appeared to run the Daily News as if gathering news were an important priority. A sad misapprehension on his part. When he was forced to lay off 20 of his 120 newsroom employees, in late February, he apparently was in tears at a staff meeting. (Compare that to the soul-dead drones with editor titles at other LANG sites for whom layoffs are a form of sport.)

I can say with assurance that Kaye’s (theoretical) boss, LANG editor Steve Lambert (based in San Bernardino), loathes Ron Kaye.

[skip]

Actually, I don’t know how Kaye survived as long as he did.

Previously:
Sports columnist blogs his firing