I first arrived in Shasta County just over a year ago, in September 2024, when summer’s fever was just about to break. The small city of Anderson is one of the last stops before you hit the Klamath Mountains when you’re driving up the mighty I-5, the interior artery of the Central Valley. I had come as a “local reporting fellow” assigned to Shasta Scout, a nonprofit news service, through a UC Berkeley program staffing newsrooms in “news deserts,” typically in remote or disenfranchised parts of the state.