WordPress, once considered mainly a tool for bloggers, has become a standby for quick-to-launch, easy-to-operate news web sites. One of the strengths of WordPress has been the ability to use story tags and categories to group similar content, such as local business coverage or cultural happenings. But now a new toolkit has been developed that allows producers to get around the key limitation of that automated aggregation — the lack of creative control over the resulting “topical” news page.

The team at Knight Digital Media Center has created a straightforward toolkit that lets producers and editors make topic-focused news pages, but with distinct, original and easy-to-maintain page elements, while still grouping content automatically around a news subject or theme.

One of the most notable advances is that editors can now lead the topic page with an ever-evolving news summary that can lay out the basics of a “topic” but be easily updated to reflect new stories as they’re added to the mix. In addition, the topic page toolkit allows the site to display a unique masthead image for each topic page, as well as a unique blogroll. And, as a nice bonus, that unique masthead and blogroll show up not just in the main topic index page, but also on any story that’s associated with the topic.

This kind of approach could be great for hyperlocal sites that are looking to create topic verticals for their community. Here’s a recent example of a topic page on California’s education budget crisis by Oakland North, a hyperlocal news project managed by the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, where KDMC folks are based. The page combines news stories with background time lines, maps, multimedia and charts.

KDMC developed the topic tool kit in late 2009 to help spread the word to its multimedia trainees about the benefits of the topic sections. I was able to test out the tools during a recent Web 2.0 training at the center, so I can attest to its ease of use and functionality — it took me just a few minutes to build a simple demo topics page.

Here’s an online tutorial to help create a topic site based on the Cutline theme, although it can be used with other WordPress themes. The tutorial, “Building a Topics System,” covers required plugins, and, if you’re familiar with PHP, there’s an additional tutorial on “Theme Modifications.”

KDMC is continuing to refine its topics tools — for instance it’s looking into integrating an ad system into the toolkit and is already thinking about how it might be adapted to publishing platforms like the iPad — so keep an eye out for improvements.

Note: A version of this post appeared previously on the Poynter.org web site’s E-Media Tidbits column, where Glenn is a contributor.

I’ve learned quite a bit since starting Sunset Park Chronicled six months ago. Certain questions that plague the startup entrepreneurial journalist or blogger were easy to answer. It was a “hyperlocal” blog, so I had an audience—the neighborhood. Few news outlets cover this part of Brooklyn, and there is demand for news. And I knew my subject well. It is my “beat” at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Getting a blog up and running is easy as well. I started with WordPress.com, which is free, and offers good looking, flexible templates.

Then comes the learning curve and the growing pains. As an individual trying to cover a large and complex community, I don’t have the luxury of taking off one hat and putting on another. I wear them all at once–I aggregate news and I write it. I fix funky links and embed video. On occasion, I editorialize.

I do it imperfectly. Nobody really knows what the news landscape will look like in ten years, or even tomorrow. We do know it’s changing. Anyone can make news, and report it. This is what I have learned:

• Be consistent. Whether weekly, twice a week, or every day, make sure to set a blogging schedule and keep to it. Remember that morning paper that once landed on your doorstep? People like to know they can find something new when they go to your site and these days, people are hungry for as many updates as you can serve up. While a flurry of updates is always nice, consistency and quality pay off in the long run.
• Take a picture. Or a video. Or make a map. Try to create an interactive environment. Get people involved, even if only through watching and clicking.
• Use tags and pingbacks. Tag those posts like the A-train in the ‘80s. Tags help direct traffic. People still fish for news erratically, and you want to catch them in your net.
• Learn search engine optimization. Painful as it is, clever headlines are quickly becoming a thing of the past. You have to put key terms in the headline—like the tags, it helps put you on the radar of Google, Bing and the like. Save your quips for the lede.
• Talk to people. Respond to your readers. Ask questions. Engage thoughtfully with critics to create good dialogue, but don’t get defensive. And don’t take things personally. Doing so tends to take everyone off topic.
• Make a comments policy, and stick to it. You need to figure out what you are willing to put up there. My policy was to  write back to commenters asking them to remove offensive language, but I chose not to do it myself. If they’re not willing to reword their comment to get the idea up there, then it was likely a fleeting thing.
• Use the blog for story ideas. I have learned a lot from writing back to commenters asking them for more. Some speak on the record, some off. Some don’t respond at all, but you never know what you will find until you reach out.
• Shameless blog promotion. A news blog provides a service, an articulation of goings-on and issues, but it can’t work properly if no one’s reading it. Use Twitter. Tell people about the blog in person (gasp!). Then let the viral nature of word of mouth do its work.
• Use your analytics, but not too much. As an editor/publisher/marketer, stats are key. You can get a sense of who is looking and when, and what they want to read and like to look at. I originally used the data embedded into wordpress.com. Now I use Google Analytics, which offers a wealth of information, some of it still opaque to me. That said, there are stories, good stories, important stories that will never get the traffic that a cute cat video on YouTube pulls in an hour. That’s okay. Cute cat coverage does not a good reporter make.
• Be transparent. Don’t pretend you are something you are not. You are helping people understand their environment better. Let them see who’s talking.
• Link. For the love of god, link. Show people where you get your information. You are an educator as much as a reporter. Help them see how the job is done. You’ll build trust and credibility, hot commodities in our information age.
• Use your resources. One of my favorites is Google Alerts. It keeps me abreast of news and blogs, and offers story ideas. Twitter works too. And there is, of course, nothing like shoe leather reporting. It’s the best part anyway.
• Do your best. Life is busy. The news is fast. Blogging is a huge responsibility. Learn how to balance it all to keep quality high, readers interested and stay sane. Technical issues can be fixed, typos corrected, but a stain on your journalistic credibility is harder to clean up.