"Employees arrived at work this morning only to learn the newspaper's board of directors had decided to shutter the paper," the Daily Californian wrote in its November 22, 2002 issue.

After passing the California Bar, she wrote articles for magazines, including The Nation and Mother Jones, and was on the staff of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Her husband Michael O'Malley, now the Planet's publisher, is a former faculty member in the University of California's computer science department whose primary research was in the field of text-to-speech conversion technology.

After the speech company was sold, Becky O'Malley served on Berkeley's Landmarks Preservation Commission for 7 years, resigning after taking over the editor's job at the Planet.

[4] Struggling financially in the bad economy, in early 2009 the Daily Planet published a full front page asking for donations, resulting in $12,000 in the first two weeks.

[5] In March 2009 the paper ran a letter from the proprietor of Urban Ore reporting that a Jim Sinkinson, representing “East Bay Citizens for Journalistic Responsibility”, asked her to stop advertising there; she claimed that he misrepresented what the Planet had been publishing.