1.) CMS - Joomla is OK Around a week ago Bengtan posted his startup on the following thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352987 http://news.ycombinator

1.) CMS - Joomla is OK Around a week ago Bengtan posted his startup on the following thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352987 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352987 http://www.prosepoint.org http://www.prosepoint.org He describes it as "Online Newspaper Software". It's opensource too. This might help you. Also there are a lot of new site plugins for Joomla. But If you want a better CMS (in general), I would suggest Drupal. Joomla (and Mambo) lacks documentation. There's even sufficient tutorials to create some cool plugins. Drupal on the other hand has a lot of plugins and clear docs. If you wanna create plugins for Drupal you won't need any tutorials. Just start off with the docs. It teaches you from the scratch and is good for beginners. Apart, the best would be to try everything possible and then choose according to your and your users needs. 2.) where do you get to recruit good people? If you wanna recruit people, but don't have a solid revenue base, try and get some freelancers working for you on a per post basis. Amazon Mechanical Turk has proved useful to a lot of guys who need small stuff done. Just toss a few cents and your job is done. 3.) If you have run a news site, any other tips you may have CREATIVITY!!! CREATIVITY!!! CREATIVITY!!! There are some data that you cannot have access to. A lot of large corporations have access to this data and offer APIs. So consider using external data too(mashup). A lot of guys run new sites. Creative ideas are what would work if you wanna penetrate into a crowded market. (shameless self promotion:) I developed a news site for a contest by Daylife. A part of the site was news search but there is another page where users can read news by their Delicious tags. Its at http://jaxly.com/deliciously http://jaxly.com/deliciously You'll find more of the content entries at http://challenge08.daylife.com http://challenge08.daylife.com Also checkout the news mashups at ProgrammableWeb. And there's another news site run by another HN member, http://jaanix.com http://jaanix.com which allows you to read news by assigning strength to keywords. As I said before, it's just about how you can enthrall your users with your creativity (and the usefulness of the site).