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.