I took a few days to reflect on the death earlier this week of Jack Kyser, former vice president and chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. and the premier voice of Southern California’s economy, before deciding whether to write anything.
Of course, the Long Beach Post’s top dog in the editorial department, Ryan ZumMallen, had quickly posted a story on Kyser’s death, so I felt in no need to write anything at all. It was enough.
But now I realize it wasn’t. For those who do not know it, Kyser was a reporter’s best friend—particularly when that reporter was writing a story about business or the economy. And I feel confident that reporters across Southern California would back me up on that.
As a reporter/blogger, I’ve known and been interviewing Kyser since 1997, writing stories with his name in them across several daily newspapers, a magazine and two websites. Just about everyone in the media knew Kyser, because the man known as “L.A.’s economic guru” was regularly quoted in stories ranging from the entertainment industry to real estate to aerospace to trade to tourism—and the list goes on and on and on.
In fact, Kyser was so often quoted in stories, that at one point a short-lived and controversial mandate was given by a few editors at more than one area newspaper to “try and find somebody else to talk about the economy,” and they commanded that “in no way should Jack Kyser be in your stories.”
And it was more than a few times that I had editors chastise me for overusing Kyser and breaking what I felt was a lame and unfair ad hoc rule. Looking back, I almost can’t blame them—almost. I can recall instances where Kyser was in three stories on the same day in the same newspaper.
The last time I recall seeing a Kyser trifecta was in the Long Beach Press-Telegram. As I recall he was in a lengthy feature story about how violent crime affects the economy, he was in a story I had written on the real estate market, and fellow P-T business reporter Felix Sanchez used him in a story on aerospace. Kyser nearly had a superfecta. Kristopher Hanson, who covers the Port of Long Beach for the paper, was on the phone with Kyser conducting an interview related to trade as the other three stories were in the cue awaiting an edit. When I heard Hanson on the phone, I went into my story and cut out Kyser’s quotes to avert any potential backlash from having him in four stories—all of which were slated to go on Page 1. Three’s enough. Sorry Jack.
However, that editors’ rule, as I stated, was short-lived, and the editors I know who attempted to enforce that rule were rightfully slapped down by those above and below them along the journalism food chain. By slapped down, I mean their mandate was largely ignored everyone.
It was a struggle not to use Kyser in stories, and often I would find myself calling him and asking him something like, “Jack, can I just get some information on background and could you possibly refer me to someone to whom I can talk with about this issue?” He’d oblige without hesitation, but the interview with someone else quite often would lack the poignancy of a Kyser interview.
And often, I would be forced, after several tires to find other sources, to tell the editors “there’s no one else that knows this stuff,” then I’d dial up his assistant, Beverly Dill, and she’d have Kyser on the phone in minutes.
It was Kyser who turned me on to dozens of groups and piles of obscure statistics I would have never thought existed. When the Downtown Long Beach Associates was contemplating spending a couple hundred thousand dollars on signage to bring more visitors to the area, Kyser pointed me to the International Sign Association so I could ask them if the DLBA was off its rocker—apparently they weren’t, according to the Sign Association folks. For an enterprise story on the growing trend in coffee houses in Southern California—this was more than 10 years ago—Kyser turned me on to the Specialty Coffee Association, headquartered in Long Beach. And for a story on how El Nino was brining an early ski season to Southern California ski resorts and boosting sales at local sporting goods retailers, Kyser quoted from the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association and gave me the names and numbers for that group to make my story the best it could be.
I recall one of the first big feature stories in my career, one in which a fellow reporter and I had both, unknowingly to each other, interviewed Kyser for a co-bylined story about why businesses were hesitant to establish themselves in the Antelope Valley—that’s the high desert region in Northeast Los Angeles County.
It was while writing that story that I started to become familiar with Kyser’s genius as it pertained to the area’s economy, as well as his brilliant and witty insight into how business, society and politics can sometimes function as a singular entity in Southern California. Among his thoughts on the topic, was one Kyser quote, in which he stated: “What the politicians in the Antelope Valley need to do is line the 40-mile stretch of the 14 (Antelope Valley Freeway) from L.A. to Lancaster with thousands of palm trees and dozens of signs that say ‘Welcome to the Antelope Valley, you are almost there.’”
It was that wit, and his knack for getting to the heart of a matter or a problem, that made him so quotable, and so valuable as a source and as an economist.
It was also the breadth of his knowledge on all things business that made Kyser such a popular media target. I’ve quoted Kyser in stories on home values rising and falling, the decline and to some degree the stabilization of the aerospace industry, retail sales going up and going down (and up and down), commercial real estate’s roller coaster, banking in good times and bad, the flight of the entertainment industry to foreign countries and efforts to bring it back, the high tech bubble inflating then bursting, travel and tourism’s ebbs and tides, trade and transportation’s surges and recessions, rising and falling crime rates and even the porn industry.
And in every interview on all of those topics, Kyser had facts and figures to back up his thoughts. I always asked him where he got his statistics, and it wasn’t more than a second or two after I finished my query that he would have for me the name, and contact information, for the resource.
A Los Angeles Times story (http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jack-kyser-20101207,0,2329452.story) written right after his death states: “He was quoted or referenced in more than 1,300 Times articles since 1985, postulating about unemployment, logistics, construction, video games, aerospace, Hollywood, pornography and even wax museums.” And according to sources in that article, he fielded about 1,000 media calls a year, and his words appeared in publications from as far as Russia and the Philippines.
I estimate I’ve written about 2,000 stories in my career, and I’ll bet Kyser’s name is in more than 10% of those articles—that’s about a year worth of stories at the pace I was turning them out in my heyday. Yes, a part of the reason for Kyser’s numerous appearances in articles with my byline was me being a lazy reporter going right to the guy with nearly all the information at hand, saving me time and hard work. That’s sort of my rhetorical acknowledgement to those editors and the others who criticized my overuse of Kyser. Yeah, Kyser was too often my crutch.
But what Jack left in the wake of his thousands of comments on topics that spanned the economic spectrum—for myself, other reporters, and those who read those comments—was a sincere passion for, and understanding of, not just the business world, but something greater: A better comprehension of how things work, both by looking in the past and to the present, and a yearning for better and clearer view of what the future may hold for us as individuals and as a society. To put it simply, Jack left us with his knowledge.