For a while we’ll be in that weird moving purgatory where we’ve found a new place to call home, but we’re still hauling odds and ends over from the old place. For a while, some of you may come here out of habit, or maybe you’ve been away a while and didn’t hear the news about this new site.

This donigreenberg.wordpress.com site – the one where you’re reading this message  – will always be here, but my updates and all the excitement will be happening over at donigreenberg.com. So you might want to bookmark (add to your favorites) donigreenberg.com to read my blogs, as well as to leave comments and check out the new digs.

Sorry for the confusion. I know it’s tough to make the transition from one place to another. But I also knew when I started this adventure that this space would only be temporary, until the Web site was ready for us to move in. 

I’ll see you at donigreenberg.com.

There, you can read my recent food post that shares two make-ahead Thanksgiving recipes.

Which reminds me, I’d better post the great recipe for Rob Roger’s mother’s mustard sauce, in case some of you are having ham for Thanksgiving. This sauce is so good you’ll want to eat it with a spoon.

Don’t forget to bookmark the new site.

Feel free to invite all your friends and family in your address book, and feel free to encourage them to invite everyone in their address books.

Before you run off, I must give credit for the speedy construction of this wonderful new Web site to a pair of very important people; a perfect match of artistic and technical talents.

First, you’ve already heard me brag endlessly about my son Joseph Domke. He hopped to it and created a blog for me as a way to cheer me up and give me a place to write, just few days after I lost my job at the paper. He lives in the Czech Republic with Marie, his brilliant and beautiful bride. 

Second is someone who’s remained bashfully humble, but he gave in to my begging and finally allowed me to disclose his identity, Jim Gore, of Redding.

Joe couldn’t have developed this Web site without Jim’s brainpower, knowledge and life experience. He’s a great friend who gives geeks everywhere a good name. He’s married to Darcie, a dear friend I’ve known since our daughters were in the Redding Co-Op Preschool. (Those little girls are nearly 30 now. Yikes.)

J&J built this Web site in a jiffy, via gmail chats, e-mails and phone calls; nine hours and a nearly a world apart. 

Remember, it’s a work in progress. Together, we can nurture it and grow it into our virtual town square; a kind, gentle and fun community gathering place.

I thank every one of you for the support and encouragement to transition from the world of newspapers into the wild, wild best of the Internet. Thank you for your curiosity, your wisdom and your suggestions. Together, I just know …

It’s gonna be good!  

As my daughter would say when she was 3, “I’m so exciting!”

I think about this Web site all the time. It’s a little like being in love. I can’t sleep for thinking about it. I spend a lot of time hanging out with it. I dream about it. I want only the best for it.

I hope we’ll be together for a long, long time.

But the thing is, this isn’t really my Web site. It’s yours.

Everything I post on it, everything I write for it, every profile, every recipe, every quote, every feature on this Web site is chosen with you in mind.

I mean really, how dumb would it be to have a Web site and ignore your wants and needs?

That’s why I recently asked for your suggestions regarding what you’d like to see on this Web site. Here’s a sample of your answers:

Judy Darting suggested a place where people could submit travel photos and information, along with tips about what to see and even what to pack.

Bob Thompson likes stories about local people and the area’s history. He also hopes for a civilized Web and blog site.

Deb Duryee said she likes local characters, local cooking, local history and of course, recipes. (Maybe she’ll share her caramel corn recipe with me again. It’s trapped in my old RS computer.)

Budd Hodges, bless his heart, requested stories about Don Chamberlain, my departed father. Dad was Budd’s former boss many years ago at KVIP in Redding, before the station converted to a Christian format.

Erin Friedman, whose wonderful, handsome sons I featured a while back in an RS food story about matzo balls, said she likes stories about local history and landmarks. She also likes food stories. (Hey Erin, how’d your pumpkin ravioli turn out?)

Beck R. wants profiles about local cooks, especially about kids. (Her adorable daughters joined other children for two years as subjects for RS food stories and cooking videos. They’re so cute that I think we should round up the kids again this year.)

Tracy said she’d like stories about local news and history.

Lori V. got specific and requested the memorable crab cake recipe from the former River City Bar and Grill in Redding.

I hear you all, and guess what? You want what I want. And as time goes on, we may want even more.

I’ll do my level best to deliver.

Meanwhile, my talented techie guys are putting the finishing touches on the Web site’s first phase.

Bear in mind that the day it goes live will be the day when it has the least amount of content.

From then on, it will expand in multiple directions and categories.

I’ll tell more about that later.

Thank you everyone who weighed in. And if you didn’t see your suggestion, or you have more ideas, no worries.

This is an ongoing conversation. Add your two cents any time.

Our Web site is a work in progress. Together we’re the architects, builders and interior decorators.

It’s looking good!

I ridiculed the transparency and complete b.s. of Lyons’ words. It was quite clever, if I do say so myself.

I felt pretty vindicated.

Then came some lies and weirdness from left field from a pair of colleagues in a blog. Wow. I didn’t see that coming. It really stung.

So I rolled up my sleeves and set out to fix their clocks, too.

I got tired and saved my entry to finish in the morning.

And here’s why it’s good to sleep on something before you mail it (or, in the case of blogs, post it).

By morning, I saw things differently. I felt different, too.

I saw those lies, partial truths and betrayals as a turd tower deposited by these people on the sidewalk of my life, put there for reasons I still do not know.

I looked at that pile and thought about it for a long time. I asked myself if I could ever imagine diving headfirst into something that awful – not just diving in, but rolling around in it.

No, of course not.

Besides, where would it get me?

Smelling and looking like crap. (Pardon my French.)

So I’m not posting that blog. I never will.

I will treat that horrible pile exactly as I would if I encountered it on the river trial.

I’ll walk around it.

And move on.

Really, two things. First, I am so grateful to you, my fellow passengers, on our exciting journey through our Blogland adventure.

Thank you for joining me.

Second, I make no secret that I’m a relative Blogland foreigner, and I’m unfamiliar with its language and customs. That’s why I welcome suggestions and observations from you seasoned, well-traveled Bloglanders, as well as insights from newcomers. For example, Barbara R. mentioned that I might want to steer clear of the boring, “I went to the dry cleaners” blog. Oh sure. How boring would that be?

Don’t feel shy about telling me what kinds of topics you’d find interesting, especially as we expand the upcoming, multi-layered Web page. We’re in this together.

Moving on, happy Saturday everyone. (Nearly 22,000 total hits as of this morning. Stop me. I can’t stop checking stats.)

Time to make a quiche for a Saturday brunch. I’ll post the recipe later.

That’s how sure I was that I’d never, ever have one. Why would I? I had a newspaper column. Everything I wanted to say I could write in a column.

Past tense. My editor booted me from the Record Searchlight two-and-a-half weeks ago.

I admit I felt pretty depressed about losing my job. So my son started this blog for me, called me from the Czech Republic and said, “Get writing, mom, your blog is ready.”

Today, this baby blog is 1 week old.

Happy birthday, little blog. You’ve grown a lot from that first day, when you received more than 1,700 hits (which I thought was great), to now.

As of a half hour ago, our baby blog has received 21,484 hits and 315 comments.

I know. I can hardly believe it myself.

There’s so much I didn’t know about blogging. For one thing, I didn’t realize there was so much going on behind-the-scenes. I didn’t realize the operators (bloggers like me) were able to moderate readers’ comments, check out the stats and even learn the source of traffic.

This explains, why, when I first discovered a cooking blog called Smitten Kitchen, I could not for the life of me figure out why all the comments were so nice and civil. Before that, my only blog experience was with Redding.com, and the comments there are about as crass and horrible and uncivilized as you can imagine. (The latest zinger was from The Bug, who said something to the effect of he was glad Doni, the “white Oprah” was gone.)

Actually, I should be so lucky to be considered a white Oprah.

You might recall that I wrote a column in the Record Searchlight about how fed up I was with those upsetting online comments. I remember a conversation I had with Silas Lyons (the editor who fired me) regarding the ugly comments.

He explained something I hadn’t realized: the Record Searchlight intentionally doesn’t read all the incoming comments. That way, if the comments turn out to be libelous, the paper can plead ignorance.

“Comment? What comment? Golly, we didn’t see it. We’ll remove it immediately. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.”

Like that. Clever, huh?

Enough about Redding.com. Back to this blog.

The first few days, most of the comments were linked from Redding.com. Hey, thanks, Record Searchlight!

Eventually, traffic flowed from other places, like Q97 radio, Thom G.’s blog, and such search engines as Google and Yahoo. (And thanks to all of you, too.)

I’m learning as I go. It wasn’t that long ago that I learned the definition of a blog (comes from a morph of Web and log).

Meanwhile, my son, Joe, in the Czech Republic, and our Redding techie friend (who’s bashful, and wants to remain anonymous) are constructing a brand new beautiful Web site. It will have photos, and links (such as when I mentioned Moonstone Bistro recently, and its wonderful pumpkin souffle, we’ll link to its Web site). It will have categories (food blogs, opinion blogs, etc.) and I’m not even sure what other bells and whistles.

I just know it’ll be great. (I think it’s gonna be good!)

Don’t worry. It’ll have the same address. You’ll be transported there automatically. No aliens involved.

“Corporate spin is vile and insidious, filled with slippery language designed to deceive and deflect and to protect the company from legal action. You can be certain anything said by officers of a company about a former employee has been vetted and cleared by a team of high-grade attorneys and professional spinners. Spiders.

This is how they kill:

1. Behind closed doors, spin a web of planned, systematic pressure.

2. Present a series of false choices to employee, ending with “Sophie, you have a choice: Your son or daughter must die. You pick.”

3. When Sophie begs for time to consider the options (because her mind cannot comprehend the unbearable choice she must make), pressure Sophie (HR calls her the “ee”) with another false choice. “Sophie, choose now, or we kill BOTH your son and your daughter.”

4. If Sophie “chooses” to save at least one child by picking the other, they criticize the choice, kill the child, and inflict shame and blame. “Tsk, tsk, Sophie, you are a criminally terrible mother. You might as well have cut your daughter’s throat with your own hand.” This causes a crippling split in Sophie’s psyche. It’s just true enough for the brain to believe it, and yet completely inaccurate. This is how they try to kill Sophie as well – they drive her crazy.

5. If Sophie says, I cannot choose between my children, they say, “Unfortunate, but that too is by your hand. You leave us no choice. Your children will die. You are banished. Get out.”

6. They start a whisper campaign of character assassination by planting certain details with known gossips: There are two sides to every story – true. Sophie was given choices – true. Sophie made her own choices – true. Management cannot talk about Sophie’s choice in honor of HR laws protecting employee privacy – true, and convenient!

7. If Sophie recovers enough equilibrium to report the false choices presented and the “choices” she made, they ramp up the whispering into a public smear campaign: “Sophie has decided to bring this issue into the open, not us. We would never. We think the less said the better. But since it is in the open, we’ll just say: If we’re Sophie, we feel crappy. But Sophie had choices. Sophie made her choices, both for herself and her family. We are of course deeply, tragically saddened to lose Sophie and her darling children, but it was completely Sophie’s choice. Thank God she can have other children. We respect and support Sophie’s choice. We grieve with Sophie. We wish Sophie the best.”

Sound familiar?”

Yes.

Some protested my firing. And they expressed love and appreciation for my 10 years of community journalism. For that, I remain humbled and grateful.

Others protested the loss of crucial staff. And they expressed support for the remaining Record Searchlight employees.

Yet others expressed outrage at their local paper’s dwindling staff and shrinking regional content since the arrival of the new publisher, Shanna Cannon.

To recap, recent key editorial losses include the graphics editor, photo editor, managing editor, editor, executive secretary, cops reporter and librarian, not to mention other top talent throughout the company, such as the circulation manager and a slew of employees 55 and older who bailed when they accepted a company buyout.

Silas Lyons replaced editor Kelly Brewer. Shanna Cannon replaced publisher Deb Smiddy.

I sure miss the Brewer and Smiddy team, and their affectionate self-reference as “the yes girls.”

Yes, their doors were open. Yes, they were willing to hear their people out. Yes, they managed with compassion. Yes, they loved this community. Yes, they’d do their best to lead with grace, humanity and kindness, even in a corporate culture.

I didn’t attend yesterday’s rally, but I heard about it. A few things struck me as significant.

Most glaring was what didn’t happen. Neither Lyons or Cannon ventured outside to address the group, which included scores of formerly dedicated readers. (I heard Silas wasn’t even in the building. When the going gets tough, the editor’s nowhere.)

How weird. How cowardly. Ignore the bloated elephant in the middle of the room and leave your underlings to handle the mess.

As one former colleague joked, if those protesters had appeared during Smiddy’s reign, she probably would have worked the crowd and served coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts. But the end of the rally, Smiddy probably would have made about 140 new friends, regained the lost subscriptions and scored some new ones.

Yesterday RS employees were left high and dry to face what must have been an embarrassing and troubling few hours. (Some employees came outside to chat with the protesters.)

But what a missed, golden opportunity for Lyons and Cannon to demonstrate bravery, leadership and grace under fire. What a rare chance to suck it up and listen to the protesters, many of whom cancelled decades-long subscriptions.

Talk about a strange choice, considering they’re in the communications business and all. Talk about a show of indifference and disregard for the newspaper’s people and its community.

Regarding the rally, many people hoped their pleas and protests might convince Lyons to reverse his decision and rescind my firing.

No surprise, that didn’t happen.

But even if Cannon had given Silas the green light to rehire me, I would have turned it down.

For me, returning to work under that regime would be like returning to a burning building and trying to write a really nice story while ignore the falling flaming timbers and toxic gases.

Lord only knows what will happen next.

Will the protesters cause one iota of positive change in the RS?

Will Cannon, who’s yet to publicly defended Lyons throughout this controversy, throw her new editor “under the bus” and make him her handy scapegoat?

Will Silas actually hire another columnist and groom him or her into his dream “metro” writer who’ll dig up dirt on prominent people? And if he doesn’t, then how will he justify firing me for not accepting that new aggressive, hold-people’s-feet-to-the-fire job description?

Will we ever know how many readers cancelled their subscriptions?

Will the RS be further gutted and then sold?

Will the publisher and editor move up the corporate ladder and leave Redding far behind?

Stay tuned.

“A local newspaper has certain responsibilities. Besides being the medium to keep us informed about our community, it is one of the main ways for the public to openly and continuously examine the ways our local government exercises its power, spends public money and makes decisions.

It is our window into the democratic process.

If a newspaper shirks this responsibility, by either reducing its staff or shifting duties to other areas, then we, the public, have lost one of the checks and balances to keeping government open and honest.

Our founding fathers thought this was important enough that it was in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

As a business, our local newspaper is responsible to provide the product promised in exchange for our payment. What we pay for and expect is news that is relevant and balanced.

The editor and publisher of this newspaper have slashed the newspaper’s staff. The result is a daily newspaper with less local stories and more wire stories, many of which are sensationalistic and irrelevant to our community.

It appears that what’s going on here is a power play.

There are two kinds of power: Perceived power and real power. Perceived power is what the editor and publisher of this paper have, by virtue of the fact that they were hired for their positions.

Real power is what is held by us, as members of this community. We exercise our real power every time we choose to open our wallets and buy a newspaper or respond to a newspaper ad by buying advertisers’ products or services.

In the last few months we have lost the editor, managing editor, photo editor, graphics editor, classifieds manager, the librarian, the executive secretary, the cops reporter, and most recently, my wife Doni Greenberg, columnist and food writer. Before her, many others left when they accepted the corporate buyout offer.

All were crucial to the daily operation of a quality newspaper.

The rank and file staff left behind are hard-working professionals who lack the tools to do their jobs effectively.

I believe the responsibility for the mass exodus of talented employees at this paper falls directly at the feet of our new publisher and editor.

My father used to tell me, “Don’t listen to what someone says, watch what they do”.

As I watch what is going on here at the Record Searchlight, it appears that this publisher and editor are gutting this paper. I believe the management of this paper is cutting staff so they can send the corporate office ever greater profits.

Unfortunately, what’s lost in this trade-off is the kind of newspaper this community wants and deserves.

I believe what we are witnessing here is the dismantling of a quality local newspaper that is being replaced with an advertising delivery system.

Of course we could use our real power. We could just stop buying the paper and it would eventually dry up and blow away. But that is for this community to decide. I hope that if we continue to let E.W. Scripps know that we demand a management team that has the skills and desire to give us the kind of paper we deserve, that they will send these two interlopers back to wherever they came from.

Then, perhaps, we’ll get the kind of management team who understands the newspaper business. People who are engaged with, and genuinely care about, the people who are our neighbors and friends.

If the Scripps corporate managers in Cincinnati don’t get the message, then perhaps it’s time they have some competition.”

- By Bruce Greenberg

Yes, Celeste is correct when she says I implore everyone to not paint the whole Record Searchlight with one rough, critical brush.

I have scores of good friends and colleagues still trapped inside the Record Searchlight – from the press room and mail room in the basement to editorial and classifieds by the front door.

These good people are not the deciders. They’re the workers, many of whom lack the financial flexibility to tell management to take this job and shove it.

They need the money. They need the benefits. And the Record Searchlight is the only newspaper game in town. So they stay. They deserve our support now, more than ever.

I’ll check back later. Enjoy this gorgeous (unseasonably warm) fall day. Keep the faith.