Darleene, blogging pioneer

Can you tell I'm catching up on my favorite blogs? I guess I could do an original post, but ...

Anyhow, Darleene, formerly of the Glendale News-Press and now of KCBS-TV's online department, is one of my blogging inspirations. She was blogging all the way back into the late '90s, before the words "blog" or "blogger" were probably even first coined, and certainly before anybody knew what the hell they meant. In those early posts, she exhibited an honesty about her own life that I found very inspiring. I probably was doing a search for "Glendale News-Press," where I worked for about five years in the early '90s, when I came upon her blog.

As I read backward, I could see her struggle to get a toehold in journalism and the journey that got her to a small-townish newspaper, and what she learned and how she grew there as a journalist. Times Community News, owner of the Glendale paper and a host of others, didn't take too kindly to her blogging, and she was out of commission for awhile, but now that Darleene is at KCBS, she's returned with Darleenisms.

Darleene uses lots of photos, and she also helps her mother, who's a wedding-floral director (I don't know what she exactly calls herself, but she does flowers -- and decorations using flowers -- at weddings), and she often photographs and posts from that. Here's a nice recent post, A Day at the Beach.