Hi, I run a profitable news blog in CapeTown, South Africa. It is profitable but I did not get there overnight. In my first year, I made a total of about USD13.

It looks scary, Isn't it?

I started making good money during my second year and from my own experience, the following are steps I took:

I started the news blog out of passion, not from the angle of making money, So I was not really worried about the money-making potential. So, make sure you are starting with genuine passion or else, you will get frustrated.
I was consistent with my posts i.e I was publishing at least 3–6 articles every day with digital newsdigital news

I focused on building strong social media followers, especially from Twitter. Facebook is good, but, trust me, twitter is good and reliable if you are looking to get outbound links of traffic back to your news blog or posts/stories
I had to build a strong SEO ( I built dofollow backlinks for my blog) before I even launched. This is to make sure I have a strong DA ( domain authority) so that my posts and stories can rank high on Google SERP because of organic traffic.
During that one year, I was also building my email subscription list. So at the end of the year, I had almost 11,000 email subscribers
On some occasions, I use to pay for Facebook Ad for any viral or promising posts/news that has the tendency to go viral and bring lots of traffic. I usually study a new post that gets lots of traffic after 5–6 hours of publishing it. So, I leverage and try to push/increase traffic using Facebook Ads. I usually spend USD5 for a day or two.
Do not copy and paste; try and write original contents/news and stories
Use social media aggressively to get traffic.