When the r/PortAngeles2 community took apart the Olympic Herald in February 2026, the thread's author framed the exercise as a public service: "My goal here has been to increase media literacy." The same author offered a caution that this publication endorses without reservation: "As with anything else in this life, always take a reddit burner account's review with a grain of salt."
Media literacy should not depend on trusting any reviewer, including us. It should depend on checks any reader can run. Below is the checklist the thread applied to the Olympic Herald, with each step restated as a test and each result stated from the public record.
1. Check the domain's age before you trust the masthead. Any reader can query a domain's registration through RDAP or a WHOIS lookup. The thread's author did: "The domain was purchased two months ago, and redirects to a substack blog." Verified: Verisign's RDAP record shows olympicherald.com registered December 26, 2025, at 01:11:15 UTC, twelve days before the site's first post. A publication that claims institutional standing but was registered the week between Christmas and New Year's is telling you its age; believe it.
2. Count the humans. A newsroom names its people: reporters, editors, an owner. A TROH review of the Olympic Herald archive found 425 posts and one byline, Anthony Tomashefsky, with no staff page naming anyone else. The site's footer carries links labeled "About," "Ethics & Standards," and "Corrections," but navigation labels are not a masthead: the donate page captured in October 2026 names no editor, no reporter, and no owning entity anywhere on it.
3. Find the building. Real outlets publish an address. The Olympic Herald publishes none. The author's previous venture, Advice Chaser LLC, carried a Better Business Bureau profile whose listed address, as a thread commenter wrote, directing readers to the BBB's overview tab, "was traced back to a storage unit on Taylor Cutoff Road in Sequim, not a business office."
4. Read the mix, not the headlines. A community newspaper covers a community: sports, council meetings, obituaries, courts. The Olympic Herald's archive shows 425 posts, of which a TROH review found 195 referencing five named individuals. 109 referencing Superior Court Judge W. Brent Basden, 58 referencing former court commissioner Brian Parker, 17 referencing Benjamin Mavy, and 11 referencing two local psychologists. The thread's author had summarized the pattern as a formula: "only run hit piece articles." The target list is not an editorial judgment; it is a countable property of the archive.
5. Follow the money to its named destination. The thread's author advised previewing the site through a snapshot link "to avoid your view being monetized by the publisher." The site's donate page asks for one-time gifts of $25 to $500 and memberships of $10 per month or $100 per year through Stripe checkout, states that "[c]ontributions are not tax-deductible," and tells readers "[y]our contribution helps us do that work." It does not name the entity that receives the money. Before donating to any "newsroom," a reader should be able to answer: which company holds my contribution? Here, the page does not say.
6. Ask whether the writer is in the story. The Olympic Herald's author is the restrained party in Clallam County Superior Court case No. 25-2-00595-05, a stalking and harassment protection order in effect through August 26, 2027, and then published 17 articles referencing the man the order protects. An outlet that covers its author's own litigation without disclosing that fact on every related article is not covering the news; it is litigating by other means.
7. Test one claim against the court file. Pick the site's most dramatic assertion and pull the record. When the Olympic Herald reported that former commissioner Brian Parker "was arrested by the Everett Police Department for felony perjury," the federal court record told a different story: an Everett officer reviewed six accusations, found five did not warrant investigation, and referred one for "charging consideration"; the Everett City Prosecutor's Office declined to file charges on December 4, 2023. No charges were filed at all. That is the September 3, 2025 order of U.S. District Judge Barbara J. Rothstein, quoting the underlying exhibits, a document any reader can pull.
8. Notice what the community already noticed. The thread's commenters included a critic of the site's readers ("I keep being appalled by the degree to which people are convinced by these 'articles,'" wrote KRK-en), a defender of citizen blogs ("welcome to the 1st amendment..."), and a commenter who cross-checked the site's wildlife-crime article against the full protection-order record and found the author's own case missing. A healthy comment section is not proof of anything, but a community performing these checks in public is what media literacy looks like in practice.
None of these steps requires a newsroom, a law degree, or a subpoena. They require a domain lookup, a count of bylines, a map search, a read of the donate page, and one trip to a public docket. The r/PortAngeles2 thread ran every one of them in February 2026, within weeks of the site's launch, and reached its conclusion before any court document was attached to the discussion.
The checklist generalizes. The next "watchdog" site that appears in Clallam County, the thread noted "quite a few of these 'watchdog' type substacks popping up", can be measured against the same eight steps. A publication that survives the checklist has earned its readers. One that fails it has merely found them.
This article relies on public court records and public complaints. TROH welcomes a response from Mr. Tomashefsky and will publish it in full.