Original cartoon by artist Phil Fountain, inspired by an Oct. 26, 2025, ANC story.
Please join me in wishing A News Cafe a very happy 18th birthday. Happy birthday, A News Cafe! It seems just yesterday you were an innocent little baby blog. Now, look at you! See how much you’ve grown? I am so proud of you and what you’ve accomplished. Congratulations!
ANC’s origin story
Traditionally at ANC, this is the time of year when I do two things: First, I retell A News Cafe’s origin story. Second, I attempt to convince regular readers to become extraordinary voluntary paid subscribers.
First, about ANC’s conception. In November of 2007 son Joseph Domke took pity upon me and emailed his mom a tanked-career life-preserver; a link to a tiny blog to cheer me up after I’d suffered the loss of my 10-year-old newspaper job in a one-newspaper town.
I first named it “Food for Thought” because I envisioned publishing my favorite kinds of writing: food stories, features and opinion columns. To my surprise, Food for Thought experienced literal overnight success when thousands of my former newspaper followers discovered where I’d landed.
Not to rub it in, but following my “departure” from my newspaper job, more than 100 readers picketed the Record Searchlight, and scores cancelled their newspaper subscriptions. [Dang!] Soon, we welcomed into the fold several former colleagues whose newspaper careers were also gutted by the 2007 Great Recession. That led to the creation of Food for Thought: A News Cafe, part features, part news. We were off to the races, with great success!
About two years into ANC’s evolution, we experienced a major shakeup, with a few horrible, humiliating years when ANC and I suffered a few extremely rocky personal and financial blows. Miraculously, ANC and I survived. Eventually I regained my footing and got back on track.
In ANC’s early years its survival depended upon a tried-and-true old newspaper advertising model. We were fortunate in those days to have the support of several stellar local businesses.
To this day ANC is honored to recognize the support of its three current incredible advertisers: Shasta Community College, Wallner Plumbing and the Redding Grocery Outlet Bargain Markets. Thank you, magnificent tech-savvy advertisers!
However, several years ago, to combat the pending death of the traditional newspaper advertising model, ANC implemented a voluntary subscription system, which is what we use today. This subscription system is what’s kept ANC alive. Even so, ANC’s relatively small number of subscribers meant that ANC has functioned on barebones financial life support for quite some time. The great news is that ANC routinely receives in excess of 100,000 unique monthly visitors. The depressing reality is that less than 1 percent of ANC readers are paid subscribers.
Maybe it’s a milk/cow situation, where tens of thousands of regular readers figure, “Why pay for a subscription if I can get it for free?”
Despite ANC’s meager income, all these years we’ve produced a tremendous body of outstanding work on the thinnest of shoestrings. I am grateful beyond words for the extraordinary, generous, heroic paid subscribers whose contributions have enabled A News Cafe to last as long as it has, as we continuously publish an impressive collection of noteworthy award-winning journalism.
Big news, major changes
With this significant birthday comes a significant announcement.
Here on A News Cafe’s 18th birthday, and as I celebrate 31 years as a journalist, it’s largely because of terrible events of the last five years that I feel inclined to turn away from the increasingly toxic topics. More and more I feel compelled to embrace positive parts of life that are joyful, healthy, interesting, wholesome, and uplifting.
I don’t like to speak of this particularly uncomfortable next subject, but since 2023 I’ve been assaulted twice while working as a journalist for ANC here in Shasta County, once in July of 2023, and most recently in November of 2024. There were no legal consequences related to either life-changing incident that left me with lingering physical and emotional repercussions.
Neither the Shasta County District Attorney nor the Shasta County Sheriff expressed an ounce of interest in providing justice in either case. I filed a complaint against the SCSO deputy who assaulted me in 2024, and never heard a word about the SCSO’s supposed internal investigation. Likewise, my 9/29/2025 email sent to the district attorney about the November 2024 incident remains unanswered. I’m not holding my breath waiting for responses from either one.
In my profession, it’s considered highly unethical to expect special treatment, favors or gifts, even for so much as a free cup of coffee. Therefore, it’s logical that my pair of assault cases received no Shasta County justice when none was provided for West Valley High School’s sexual hazing victims, or the teenage boy nearly mauled to death by a controversial cop’s K-9s, or for the Redding man who received a full-on recorded death threat from a local militia leader, or justice for the man terrorized in his trailer by local extremists (update, that man now awaits trial for shooting someone through his trailer’s door). Likewise, Shasta County law enforcement provided zero justice for the mentally ill combat veteran gunned down by a SCSO deputy, or for the Purple Heart US Marine Corp veteran roughed up by law enforcement.
Those examples are but a sample, right off the top of my head. So it goes in Shasta County.
Since 2020, I’ve received an uptick death threats, as have other ANC staffers. Earlier this year, while I covered a Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting, someone drove a long nail fully into my car’s rear passenger tire’s sidewall near its rim as it was parked in the county parking structure. And a few years ago someone scattered a bucket of rusty screws and nails down my back-alley driveway. One month before my 2023 assault, a Redding radio personality suggested I be tried and executed in a Nuremberg trial, and that I deserved to be dragged behind a car and publicly hanged. And more recently, in a much more benign – but telling – show of profound rage, after encountering a well-established ANC-hater inside Safeway, I returned to the parking lot after shopping to find my car’s side mirror flipped over, and a thick blob of wet mucus running down my car’s passenger window.
If you’ve followed my career for any length of time, you know that I’m neither a quitter nor a whiner. Although it’s true that I did receive the Society of Professional Journalists’ golden sledgehammer award, and the Sacramento Press Club’s courage in journalism message engraved on a slate coaster as a testament of peers’ recognition of my bravery in the face of violence while working as a journalist, in the end, it turns out that I am human, after all.
Today, A News Cafe finds itself facing an iconic birthday. At 18 years old, ANC is mature enough to leave the nest. It’s also wise enough to avoid harm as it sets out on different paths to see how things go.
Therefore, on this special occasion of ANC’s pivotal birthday, I will pivot personally, too. As I did in the beginning, I will primarily venture solo for this next leg of A News Cafe’s next journey; at least for now, as I steer ANC back to its earliest roots, where I wrote features, food stories and opinion columns.
This is the month of Thanksgiving. First, I extend my deepest, most sincere thanks to advertisers and voluntary paid subscribers who’ve supported ANC. Thank you! Next, I give a prolonged standing ovation to ANC’s brilliant paid staff; some of the most wonderful, ethical and talented humans I’ve ever known; a group who began as colleagues, but who are now friends: R.V. Scheide, Mike Chapman, Barbara Rice, Shawn Schwaller, Jon Lewis, Phil Fountain, Alan Phillips and Benjamin Nowain. Thank you! In the future, you may occasionally see some of their work appear here from time to time, but far less frequently.
Likewise, I give additional sincere thanks and a huge shoutout to volunteer Photo Cafe providers David Bogener, Joanna Snyder and Jim Dowling, for sharing with us your incredible photographs. Thank you for bringing photographic beauty and excellence to pages that often contained troubling wince-worthy stories. I love ANC’s Photo Cafe, and hope its talented photographers will remain for a long time to come.
To the wonderful paid, voluntary subscribers who choose to continue your support of ANC’s new direction, I humbly thank you, and look forward to embarking on this next new journey together.
Finally, to those who’ve never supported ANC, perhaps after hearing me out today you’ll consider this the right time to step up and support local journalism. If so, I invite you to become a brand new subscriber. Welcome, and thank you all!
On a serious note, please hear me when I say this: I am not quitting. Instead, I’m pivoting toward sanity, creativity, positivity and OK, yes, self-preservation.
Nobody could dispute that I’ve more-than paid my dues as a journalist, often while working and reporting under terrifying, dangerous circumstances. With these unsavory Shasta County conditions in mind, and given what I’ve experienced the last few years, it’s apparent to me that now’s the time for me get my bearings and leave the worst parts of the Shasta County shitshow in my rearview mirror for a spell.
Don’t worry, I have no plans to drive off and disappear into the sunset. However, I will allow myself to slow down, catch my breath and grant myself the absolute necessity to regroup, heal, and reflect so I can once again regain my voice, my footing, and get back on track.
I’ve done it before. I will do it again.
Here on A News Cafe’s 18th birthday, I hope you will join me as we find our way together during some of our country’s and county’s darkest, most challenging times. Although we are in dire need of joy, peace, safety and hope, most of all, what we most need now is each other.
Join me and see. I think it’s going to be good.
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