Follow along as metaprinter.com founder and senior writer Robert Ivan builds a community news blog for Aberdeen Township New Jersey at NJcircles.com/AberdeenTownship.

I figure this could be a huge help for many of my readers who are either interested in starting their own community site (some call this BeatBlogging).  To my main stream media readers  who come here to stay on top of news media trends, this entire exercise could be a real lesson in the new realities of online publishing.

The site is called NJcircles (because I already had the domain from a previous project) and is located at NJcircles.com/AberdeenTownship and built using Movable Type.  I selected MT because the metaprinter site is built on WordPress and I’ve got those skills down pretty good, so I want to learn Movable Type CMS and share that experience as well.   It doesn’t hurt that MT is used by power bloggers like Jason Kottke, media companies like National Geographic, and community news sites like Baristanet.

Here are the first steps.  I’m going to assume you know how to do certain things so please let me know if you need help and we’ll work through this together.

This Takes Time.  You will not make money for a while. It may take months or years to break even:

1. Know that building and maintaining a robust online community news site will take up a lot of your time so tell your significant other what you are attempting to do.  Go to bed a couple hours early and wake up a couple hours before your family gets up so you’re not disrupting everyone’s life and ignoring your kids during the day.  If you’re single?  Work around the clock.  Now’s your time to go for broke.

Know Your Purpose.  I am doing this because I am not impressed with the news coverage of my community:

1. Target a small community that you know intimately.  It could be a geographic community like a town or a niche like remote control cars.  This makes it easier for you to distinguish your site and build a community around it.  You are not building a newspaper.  You are building a Blog.  Blogs work because of the way they allow people to comment, link out, and yes, sometimes steal your content.

Technical:

1. Select a name for your site and see if it is available in a place like InstantDomainSearch
2. Find a host for your site.  I use Webfaction and have never had a problem yet.
3. Select a Content Management System (CMS) to publish on.  This site is built on the popular WordPress CMS which has a huge community of developers building themes and plugins.   The NJcircles site is built using Movable Type which has a smaller development community but offers a supposedly more robust security as well as having core plugins built right in and supports higher traffic.  We’ll see.  Both are FREE.
4. If you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about at this point you should build your site using Blogger which is the easiest to learn to use, allows advertising, and does not require you to get your own hosting.   Blogger is a good way to learn online publishing, but be warned that bogger is limited in what you can modify.  The most popular blog using Blogger is the ridiculously great PostSecret but you’ll notice their revenue comes from the PostSecret Books, not on site ads.

Here is what I did on day 1:

1. I already had a domain name so I used it.  You should try and buy one that is short and on topic.
2. Download Movable Type
3. Install Movable Type
4. Select a blog name and update some info.  Create an About page so people who stumble up the site know what it is going on.
5. here it is.   You’ll notice that it is generic looking.  I have yet to do any modifications to the default theme.

To follow this series just select NJcircles from the “categories” menu at the top of this blog.  In the next installment I will modify the site to give it a more personal look as well as add some links related to my beat.

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