Ron Kaye: Why local newspapers matter

Great newspaper stories — like the shocking L.A. County tax scandal involving Assessor John Noguez — usually don't come from attending government meetings or going to press conferences.

The tip that ignites a reporter's passion almost always comes in a telephone call, as it did last December for Randy Economy, investigative reporter for the Los Cerritos Community Newspaper, a 55,000-circulation weekly with a staff of five, including owner-publisher Brian Hews.

What happened over the next eight months shows just how important professional news media still are in the age of the blogosphere — even small community and weekly newspapers — at a time when the total audience for local TV news and large daily newspapers is smaller than what the No. 1 station and dominant paper in a market used to attract.

For Economy, 52, who is legally blind, with only partial vision in his left eye, and Hews, whose family owned the Wave newspapers until 1998, it has been the adventure of a lifetime.

“The first call we got back in December was from an employee deep inside the assessor's office and he was angry, and very passionate about what was going on inside the office,” Economy recalled last week.

“He said, ‘There's this guy who's always in John Noguez's office, and he's going around telling everybody what to do. You got to check this guy out. It's creepy. I called the L.A. Times. I called Channel 2. I'm reaching out to everybody and nobody is taking my calls.”

“I'll take your call, I'll listen,” responded Economy, 52, who spent most of his career as a political consultant and government relations aide in the cable TV industry until joining the Los Cerritos staff two years ago.

In meeting with his source and getting other calls from insiders, Economy learned the guy in Noguez's office was tax agent Ramin Salari, one of half-dozen slick operators who rounded up contributions to Noguez's campaign and got favorable treatment for their clients in the form of massive property tax assessment reductions on luxury homes and buildings — reductions that were worth hundreds, even thousands, of times the value of donations.

Just before Christmas, David Demerjian, head of the county district attorney's Public Integrity Division, confirmed to Economy that “inquiries” were opened into two possible cases involving the assessor's office.