The Olympic Herald presents itself to readers as a news organization. It has sections. Investigations, Courts & Law, Government, Criminal Justice, Education, Free Speech, Public Health, Opinion. It has a donate page that speaks of "Washington journalism" in the plural language of an institution. It has a corrections page, an ethics page, a contact page that promises "one independent newsroom."
What it does not have is a newsroom. It does not have reporters. It does not have an editor. According to the Olympic Herald's own pages, it has one person: Anthony Tomashefsky.
The site's ethics page states it plainly, under the heading "Who owns this thing": "One person: founder Anthony Tomashefsky. No parent company, no investors, no chain. The money comes from readers, voluntary subscriptions and donations, and that's it."
The site's author archive page states it again. Every article on the Olympic Herald is filed under a single author page, headed "Anthony Tomashefsky's Work," which as of this week carries the count "425 Articles." The bio beneath his name describes him as an "investigative journalist covering Washington courts, judicial conduct, and local government" and claims membership in the Society of Professional Journalists, a claim TROH has not independently verified.
TROH's own archive of the site tells the same story. Of the 424 Olympic Herald articles preserved in our crawl, every single one carries the same byline: Anthony Tomashefsky. Not one other name appears. There is no staff page listing a single colleague; the site's /staff/ and /our-newsroom/ addresses return "page not found" errors, and the About page that the ethics page points readers to, "The receipts are on our About page," the site says, does not load at all, trapped in a redirect loop as of October 25, 2026.
Named on Reddit months ago
The one-man operation was an open secret in the community long before the site's own pages admitted it. In a February 2026 thread on the Reddit community r/PortAngeles2 titled "Monetizing defamation blogs - OH,OWD," a commenter identified the Olympic Herald's author by name: Anthony Tomashefsky. The thread drew 45 upvotes and 11 comments, with users dissecting the site's structure, its corporate history, and its donation solicitations.
A commenter on r/PortAngeles2 names Anthony Tomashefsky as the man behind the Olympic Herald. (Reddit/r/PortAngeles2)
The Reddit identification matches the public court record. In Clallam County Superior Court case No. 25-2-00595-05, Benjamin Mavy petitioned for a protection order against Anthony Tomashefsky in August 2025. A one-year stalking and harassment protection order was granted August 26, 2025, effective through August 26, 2027, after Tomashefsky failed to appear. Judge Brent Basden's October 21, 2025 memorandum opinion denying Tomashefsky's motion to revise that outcome found the record "amply supports" the harassment and stalking determination. Two months later, on December 26, 2025, the domain olympicherald.com was registered, according to RDAP registry data. The site's first articles appeared in January 2026.
What the census shows
A newspaper's bylines tell you who is doing the work. The Olympic Herald's 425 articles name the same man every time, and their subjects cluster tightly around the people connected to his court case. TROH's verified count of the archive: Judge Basden, who ruled against him, appears in 109 articles. Court Commissioner Brian Parker, whose August 27, 2025 order rejected Tomashefsky's attempt to invoke Washington's anti-SLAPP statute in the protection-order case, appears in 58. Ben Mavy, the petitioner the court protected, appears in 17. Two psychologists whose evaluations touched his orbit, Dr. Steve Tutty and Dr. William Singer, appear in 6 and 5 articles respectively.
The site's contact page makes the staffing explicit without meaning to: "One independent newsroom, one inbox, every message gets read." One inbox. The email address published there is a free ProtonMail account. There is no phone number, no office address, no editor to escalate a complaint to, because there is no one else.
The site itself has acknowledged its scale. On October 21, 2026, it published an opinion piece titled "Nine Months of Independent Journalism, Built by Our Readers", nine months of output, all of it attributable to the same single byline.
One man, 425 articles, and a target list that maps onto his own litigation history. That is not a newsroom. It is a diary with a domain name, one that asks readers, on every visit, to pay for it.
This article relies on public court records and public complaints. TROH welcomes a response from Mr. Tomashefsky and will publish it in full.