Goddess of Pomona returns (permanently?)

The Goddess of Pomona blog is back. After shutting down in early June and putting her page off-limits behind a wall, G of P removed the wall (did someone proclaim “Ms. Goddess, tear down this wall”?) after the Pomona fire near her neighborhood.

Although she initially described her return as her “possible comeback,” she’s posted seven times since then. Guess it’s safe to welcome her back.

In the meantime, the go-to source for Pomona news and commentary online has become M-M-M-My Pomona. It presents a Lincoln Park-centric view of the city, understandable since that’s where its bloggers live, but it did good work on the fires and often has reports and chatter about council meetings.

(Pomona has a real blogging community with something like a dozen blogs, most of which link to each other. Claremont has a couple. If our other cities have local blogs, they’re keeping quiet about it.)

Wish I could be as positive about the Foothill Cities Blog, which attempted to cover the area from Pasadena to Claremont. After a good push, the blog sputtered, crashed, returned on a limited basis with contributions almost entirely from Monrovia (and, hmm, with Pomona and Claremont reversed in its west-to-east lineup of cities) and now hasn’t been updated since June 9.

It can’t be easy to stay motivated to produce a blog when you’re volunteering. Which is too bad, in my opinion; I like the competition and the alternative voices.

Granted, the utility of city-centered blogs as news sources is limited. Unlike newspapers, bloggers rarely phone anyone, show up at City Hall, request documents or pound the pavement. They just write about whatever crosses their field of vision. That’s fine, especially since most blogs are a hobby, but the result is no replacement for a newspaper.

Some bloggers come across like people writing in their underpants in darkened rooms, griping because all their questions about the world can’t be answered by the Internet. (“Mr. President, tear down this cave!”)

Still, the difficulty in keeping a local blog up and functioning in the long term ought to give pause, and perhaps already has, to those who were quick to proclaim the faults of the so-called mainstream media and the supposed superiority of the blogosphere, which would rise to take our place as local news sources. Maybe someday, but not quite yet, obviously.

Flawed we most certainly are, but hey, at least we’re still at it every day.

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