Matt Neznanski started a new beat blog — his second — a few months ago, but hasn’t found the success he was looking for.

His latest beat blog, Green City, is on sustainable living in Corvallis, Oregon. He wants to make this a community project, because it was the community that inspired him to start the blog:

In April, nearly 600 people showed up to a town hall meeting hosted
by the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition to start building a plan for
sustainability in Corvallis. This followed closely on the heels of
Corvallis being named “Best Green City” in the nation by Country Home
magazine.

But while “green” implies an environmental focus, the folks at the
April meeting learned that sustainability has three intersecting
spheres: environmental, social and economic. Clearly, this means we’ll
have to make choices — sometimes tough ones — as we move forward.

Our city’s focus on sustainability means that we as a news
organization will be spending a lot of time with it and the best way to
learn how to live green and understand sustainability would be to do so
together.

Our Green City site will gather our reporting to tell you about
local people doing inspiring things to foster sustainability and we’ll
direct you to events to meet people and learn more about it.

Neznanski has run into several problems:

• His paper is in a college town, and many people leave town during the summer. He is trying to find new ways to keep his blog active during the slow summer months.
• He has had trouble getting guest bloggers. He wants this blog to have a lot of community voices, but only one person has written a guest post for him so far. He underestimated the impact that summer would have on his blog.
• Neznanski wants to start linking to more outside content about sustainable living. He originally planned on doing this, but got away from it. He wants to get back to it and believes it will help make his blog stronger.
• Some people who are interested in writing about sustainability have never written for a blog before. Neznanski has to help them learn how to write blog posts.

Neznanski did discover several positive things, however. His paper is now able to launch a new blog in about an hour due to WordPress. He said that anyone can learn to use WordPress in a short period of time, and the software is free. It’s been a really strong CMS for his newspaper.

Click here to stream the interview. Or click here to download the mp3.