According to the Labor Department, the U.S. economy added 290,000 jobs during April, bringing to nearly 500,000 the number of jobs created since the beginning of 2010–yet another sign a recovery is underway.

Better yet, new jobs came in a variety of U.S. industries – manufacturing, health care, leisure and hospitality to name just a few – and in government, thanks to Uncle Sam hiring temporary workers to help with the 2010 Census.

The recent jobs report from the U.S. Labor Department brought news that unemployment rates for older workers remain lower than for other age groups.

But the news wasn’t all good. Once older workers, especially boomers over 55, lose a job, it takes them longer to find a new one than any other age group.

Despite a brighter overall picture, people ages 45 to 54 continue to be caught in a “perfect storm” of lower-than-expected earnings and retirement savings at the same time family demands and expenses, are rising.

Read the rest of this post at SecondAct.com: Job picture mixed for older workers.

You’ll be shocked at the answer – though if you’ve been in the freelance business very long maybe you won’t be.

I posed that question last week to the members of Freelance Success, a subscription-only message board for independent journalists, paid bloggers and other professional freelancers.

Of the 20 or so writers who answered, only one had three or more clients who paid invoices via direct deposits into her checking account. A couple others had two clients who made direct deposits. The majority had one or none.

Me? I have one – and they started making direct deposits only last month, although before that they paid via wire transfer, which is even faster though my bank charged a small fee for accepting them.

It’s not like direct deposits are all that innovative. When I worked at a daily newspaper some 20 years ago, my twice-monthly paychecks went straight into my checking account.

So why are publishers so reluctant to keep up with the electronic times?

Could it be they want to hang onto their money as long as possible, including the time it takes a check to get from the accounting department to their contributors’ mailboxes? Are times so bad they need the float on what amounts to a blip in the overall scheme of publishing industry expenses?

Are they do behind the times they have yet to automate expense management?

What other reasonable explanation could there be?

Or is my sample bad, and most writers are being paid this way?

For all the grousing I do about content mills like Demand Media, they do have one thing going for them – they use PayPal and other online payment mechanisms to pay contributors, though in many cases writers must earn a minimum amount before they see a dime.

Given what I think of content sites, you know things are bad when I’m siding with the Demand Medias of the world.

The next time you’re negotiating with a new publishing client, speak up. Ask to be paid via direct deposit. Strike that. Demand to be paid via direct deposit. It’s time we freelancers took a stand and dragged publishers into the electronic payment age.

Eat My Shorts – This week the tagline I use for this standing Friday feature – to do great writing read great writing – is slightly misleading because some of the great writing I came across I didn’t read, I listened to. I’m referring to a segment on last week’s edition of PRI’s This American Life radio program. “Eat My Shorts,” co-produced with ProPublica calls into question the excuse heard a lot on Wall Street and in government hearings that nobody saw the financial meltdown coming. The piece does so by examining the actions of a hedge fund named Magnetar that figured out how to game the system – and made a mint doing it.

TAL fans will recall that Alex Blumberg, one of the investigative reporters on the project, also worked on the show’s now famous May 2008 segment, The Giant Pool of Money, which NYU recently called one of the top 10 journalism projects of the past decade. This 40-minute program is riveting, as fine a piece of explanatory journalism as you’ll get. It’s also a great example of how dramatic, influential, and dare I say even sexy, good business journalism can be.

ProPublica and the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes – Speaking of ProPublica, the five-year-old nonprofit investigative news agency walked away with the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. ProPublica reporter Sheri Fink took the award for her story Deadly Choices at Memorial, on life-and-death decisions made by doctors at one hospital during Hurrican Katrina. Fink won the honor in conjunction with the New York Times Magazine, which ran her piece.

ProPublica’s win marks the first time a nonprofit news organization has won a Pulitzer, recognized as the highest honor in U.S. journalism. It’s a big step for the New York-based outfit, and for the dozens of other nonprofit news organizations like it that are forming all over the country. Look for those organizations to use this a rallying cry for assistance, both from experienced journalists they hope will come to work for them as well as donations they hope to attract.

Read the entire list of 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners here.

Introducing Inside Edge, an online magazine on corporate finance for midsized companies sponsored by American Express and Federated Media.

The site’s still in a soft launch, which means it’s up and running and the sponsors are cranking up their own marketing machinery to formally announce it soon.

But I couldn’t wait any longer to share what I’ve spent so much time working on over the past five months. You can access it at www.GetTheInsideEdge.com or www.americanexpress.com/insideedge.

In addition to providing the team from American Express and Federated that developed the site with direction on editorial content, my main role has been as features editor, planning, assigning and editing stories in the Articles section. The site’s launching with several of these, and you’ll see more added each week.

The site’s still in the early stages and lots more bells and whistles are on the drawing board, including interactive elements that will let readers share stories they like on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Amex you probably know. If you don’t know Federated Media, it’s a five-year-old San Francisco digital media company that runs ad networks for 100 major blogs including Dooce, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat. One of Federated’s cofounders is John Battelle, who started The Industry Standard, an Internet industry magazine I wrote for in the late 1990s before the dot-com bust.

American Express hopes the site will gain the same kind of success it’s had with OpenForum, a website for small business Federated Media helped the financial services company launch three years ago. OpenForum runs original stories and videos, content from influential small business and finance blogs, an active community forum and attracts close to 830,000 visitors a month.

Both Inside Edge and OpenForum are what the media industry calls custom publications, that is, magazines – in this case online magazines – produced by a company for its customers. Though not journalism in the strictest sense, at Inside Edge we’re trying nonetheless to provide timely, informative stories on financial matters that midsized companies care about, including expense management, cash flow, credit, and more.

Visit InsideEdge and find out for yourself. I’ll see you there.

Last year, I spent approximately $8,064 on computers, Internet and phone service, dues and subscription, insurance, accounting and other expenses related to my freelance writing business.

Need a good reason why you shouldn’t write for free or for sites that pay pennies a word or a fraction of that per click? You’re never going to cover those kinds of expenses if you do.

And if you want a thriving freelance business, you’re going to have those kinds of expenses.

In honor of the current tax season, I’ve been looking at my 2009 income and expenses, to understand how both changed due to the recession and to the changing economics of the media industry.

Last week I wrote about how the recession affected my income. My annual income dropped 17 percent, mainly because two big clients, a trade magazine and the website of a national business magazine, cut their freelance budgets substantially.

With less money coming in, you’d think I would have put the breaks on business-related expenses.

On the contrary, I made a conscious decision to ramp up spending in some areas of my business, to do a better job marketing myself, improve my productivity and keep up with the times.

Those investments are already paying off: new opportunities started opening up in Q4 – for lots of freelancers, not just for me – and the first quarter of 2010 was my best since going solo in 1995.

What were those investments? Last year I:

• Bought a netbook – the first portable computer I’ve ever owned (embarrassing but true).
• Upgraded to a smartphone, partly for better access to email, the web and texting from my phone, but also to familiarize myself with what is fast becoming an important news platform.
• Paid out of pocket to attend a journalism seminar, for professional development purposes. I also split the cost of a conference in an industry I cover that I attended to report several stories.
• Paid for web hosting, domain names and website design, all to better brand my blog and my business, and so I could start using my blog as a revenue stream (something I wasn’t allowed to do while I was still using WordPress.com‘s free blogging platform).

Here’s how my business expenses broke down by percentage of the total:

• 1. Travel (33%) – A bit misleading because more than half these expenses were reimbursed by clients
• 2. Computer hardware and software (12%) - Includes a netbook, smartphone and accessories, webcam, a couple software programs and some miscellaneous electronic gadgets.
• 3. Online services (12%) – Includes monthly broadband access fees and all the website costs I listed above.
• 4. Insurance (9%) – I bought errors and omissions insurance for the first time in years when I started a freelance editing job and felt I needed the safety net of an insurance policy should I run into some unexpected trouble.
• 5. Dues and subscriptions (9%) – Includes dues to three professional organizations, subscriptions to a half-dozen newspapers and magazines (the print kind) and the odd magazine or book I picked up at a newsstand or bookstore throughout the year.
• 6. Telephone (7%) – Land line and mobile phone charges.
• 7. Conferences and seminars (6%)
• 8. Accounting (6%) – Represents my share of the accountant my husband and I hire to check over our annual tax return (we’re both self employed, it’s a complicated return.
• 9. Office supplies (3%)
• 10. Shipping/postage/faxes, meals, parking (Less than 1% each) – What can I say, when I’m in town I don’t get out much.

I should note that I didn’t itemize a couple things freelancers regularly include in their business expenses, such as a deduction for my home office and the portion of utilities that could be associated with a home office.

If you’ve finished doing your 2009 taxes, how did your expenses break out differ from last year? Did you spend more than usual in a certain category for a specific reason? Please share.

If recession took it’s toll on your freelance work like it did on mine, chances are your income was down in 2009. I made matters worse by deciding to invest in some new toys office equipment and rev up marketing efforts by attending an out-of-town conference, both of which increased my expenses.

But I’ll talk about expenses in another blog post. For now I wanted to focus on income. Look close enough and you’ll see lots of stories hidden inside last year’s income. Analyze them and you can learn what you did right and where you went wrong so this year you can repeat your victories and avoid your mistakes.

In 2009, my overall income was down approximately 17 percent, due mainly to significant drops in the amount of work I received from two regular clients – the fall out from putting too many eggs in too few baskets coming back to haunt me. My biggest regular client cut what it paid me 43 percent in 2009; my income from another regular dropped 63 precent from the previous year. Neither one cut their per-word fees, they just assigned fewer stories, adjusting their freelance budgets to lower advertising revenue.

The numbers aren’t all bad. In 2009, I wrote for 10 clients, up from eight the previous year. In 2008, my two biggest clients accounted for 72 percent of my income, whereas in 2009, they represented only 49 percent, meaning I did a better job of spreading my work and income over more clients. In 2009, I worked with five new-to-me publications that accounted for about a third of my total income. Those new clients included several start ups, which was a risk on my part but turned out to be fun (and everybody paid what they owed).

Another reason the numbers aren’t all bad: by the end of the third quarter of 2009, I saw an uptick  in work coming my way, a trend that grew even stronger in the last quarter of the year when I signed a six-month contract for a freelance editing assignment that will help make 2010 one of my best years ever. I’ve heard from a number of other full-time independent writers that they too started seeing more work flowing in at the end of the year and are predicting a fruitful 2010.

Several other observations from analyzing last year’s income:

Last year, almost half of what I wrote – 47 percent – was for media properties that exist only online – not surprising seeing that’s where the industry is headed. The rest was for trade or business magazines that publish stories simultaneously in print and online, or in print first with a few weeks delay before the material was available online. None of work I did in 2009 was only for print.

I missed a personal goal of generating income from alternative revenue streams, such as adding ads to my blog or selling e-books or reprints. But I’ve already taken steps to make that happen in 2010. I joined the BlogHer ad network in February and have other income-generating plans in the works that I’ll share when the time’s right.

More than three-quarters of the work I did in 2009 – 78 percent to be exact – was for editors I’d worked with before, either at their present publication or a previous one. Some of those editors I’ve known for 10 years, others even longer.  There’s no better evidence than that of the power of networking.

If you’ve done your taxes, what stories does your 2009 income tell about your freelance business?

Last year was all about hunkering down, sticking with what you were doing, or taking the gigs you were offered even though they might not be your long-term dream assignments.

But in the past few weeks, I’m hearing from writers, editors and publishers who’re making major moves, all of them positive:

• An editor friend got the offer of a lifetime to run a new nonprofit news daily covering a major metropolitan area.
• An author, blogger and ex-newspaper editor got an offer to run a start up being launched by a major magazine company.
• A former daily newspaper business reporter and editor who’d gone to work for a college communication department after being downsized landed a job at the same start up.
• A West Coast media company is looking to full a junior-level website editor and production position on the East Coast as work for their clients there grows.
• A Rocky Mountain area freelance writer and editor reports being crazy busy with assignments, including a series she pitched to a national business publication.
• A Midwest freelance writer is beginning a publicity project for a well-known media training company

I know it’s only anecdotal, but it’s good news all the same.

One more thing: although I don’t know the particulars of every situation, I do know that for the most part, this work didn’t just fall out of the sky for these people. It happened because even while opportunities were frozen solid they were preparing for the day things would start to thaw. How? By staying in touch with their contacts, present and past. By working their virtual and real-word networks. By tinkering with side projects to learn new skills, even if those endeavors didn’t bring in any income.

What’s your good news? Is your business picking up? Are you seeing cracks in the ice? And if so, what did you do to make them happen?

It was the year conferences went digital, Twitter went viral and the bad economy made every writer a business reporter.

It was the year phrases like hyperlocal, meetup and content aggregators entered freelancers’ lexicon.

It was the year of the mobile app, the multimedia story, SEO tags and crowdsourcing.

It’s only fitting that as we say goodbye to 2009, and with it the first decade of the 21st century, we also bid farewell to journalism practices of yesterday and embraces those of the future as the media business leaves print behind (more or less) for an online-only world and all the changes, risks and opportunities that come with it.

With that in mind, here are my picks for the top media trends of last year, and what they mean for independent writers in 2010:

Content aggregators – They’ve been called mills, farms, and in one case even demonic. I’ll stick with the more neutral-sounding content aggregators to describe sites such as Demand Studios, Associated Content, Helium, and possibly AOL’s new Seed.com. All those sites are hiring freelancers to churn out thousands of SEO-enabled how-to pieces and other “articles” a day in hopes the information will show up high in Google search rankings thereby maximizing the proprietors’ online advertising earnings. The debate over the opportunity these sites present for freelance writers has raged on here and on other freelance blogs for the better part of the year, and media industry heavyweights have weighing in with their (mostly) negative opinions.
Takeaway for freelancers: Content aggregators are here to stay, at least for the short term – although recent changes Google’s made to its search algorithm could affect them in the long run. Also here to stay are a contingent of writers happy for the query-free gigs these sites offer, even if the rates they pay are pitifully low when calculated on a piece-by-piece basis. I remain unconvinced of the merit of doing this type of work, though understand its attraction to someone breaking into the freelance business or with limited time or desire to pitch stories.

Hyperlocal – From the everything-old-is-new-again department. Never have so many been so interested in what’s happening in your Zip Code, your voting precinct, your city block or rural postal route. They are to the news business what nanotechnology is to the tech industry. From biggies like MSNBC, AOL and Examiner.com’s billionaire owner Philip Anschutz to tiny startups, hyperlocal is everywhere. According to Knight Citizen News Network, journalists and hobbyists have started more than 800 hyperlocal sites to date. But will they last? Some are already shutting down. The cofounders of one ambitious southern California hyperlocal project – both long-time journalists – opted to shutter their site at the end of 2009 despite accolades, ads and a partnership with their area’s major metro daily. Why? They couldn’t scale the business to make it profitable without taking on more employees – and the cost that comes with them – a step they were unwilling to take.
Takeaway for freelancers: Hyperlocal remains a viable alternative to working for content aggregators. But like aggregators they don’t pay much. Treat it like the experiment it is. Include work for hyperlocal sites in a broader assignment mix so if a venture goes under you’re not stuck. Or if you go on staff, treat it like a stint at a community newspaper – which is basically what it is – and gauge how long you’re willing to stay for the experience and clips you’ll gain. If you’re interested in starting one of these on your own, you can apply for one of 9 grants of $25,000 each that American University’s J-Lab is awarding for community news sites this year. Applications are due March 1.l

Nonprofit news – This year, everybody who wasn’t busy creating a hyperlocal news site was putting together a 501c3 to start a nonprofit news venture (actually, some were one and the same). According to popular thinking, if nobody’s making money from advertising anymore, why bother, just start out as a nonprofit and hunt for financing through grants, corporate sponsorships, subscriptions and donations. So far it’s working for sites such as MinnPost, Voice of San Diego and ProPublica, which have raised hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars respectively. The bigger question: whether it’s a model that dozens, or hundreds of other ventures can successfully duplicate, similar to the country’s public radio stations. As a matter of fact, don’t rule out the country’s public radio stations as a source of nonprofit news innovation, as stations such as Oregon Public Broadcasting are busy working to expand their coverage areas and the news they dish up on their websites.
Takeaway for freelancers: Nonprofits aren’t the backwater they used to be, especially if an organization is savvy or lucky enough to get backed by Knight Digital Media or another source of major grant funding. Most of these enterprises are being started by ex-newspaper or magazine journalists – meaning if you write for them you’re more likely to get high-quality editing, always good for the clips file.

User generated content – Where to begin. User-generated content is old news if you think of it in terms of YouTube and Facebook. But it’s catching on in new ways. For example, in a different type of user-generated content, more companies are choosing to bypass newspapers and magazines and instead of advertising, starting custom publications, especially online. Expect these types of projects to flourish in 2010 (Disclaimer: I started working on one of them not long ago). Is it journalism? Yes, and no. Sponsored content is after all, sponsored content. But some sponsors understand that for their publications to be taken seriously they have to present information that’s reported and presented like the real deal. The more well-known user-generated content trend is of course the reader comments, videos, etc., that more publications are building into what they do. Expect to see newspapers, magazines and websites do even more of this in 2010.
Takeaway for freelancers: If you don’t already do work for custom publications, now’s the time to look into it. Don’t think you have to pitch publishers of custom publications for the work. If you’ve written for corporate clients in the past, why not pitch them on a news site, or even an e-newsletter. Another options: introducing yourself to one of the growing crop of digital media agencies that produce online-only custom publications. As for the other kind of user-generated content – any writer running a blog or specialized social network has to think about ways to maximize reader involvement.

Entrepreneurship - With so many journalists getting laid off, it was inevitable some would go into business for themselves. Unlike long-time solo writers – such as yours truly – these reporters and editors don’t want to identify themselves as “freelancers,” a word that for better or worse still connotes a lower status word worker in some circles. Besides, some portion of these newly unleashed writers are opting to steer their own destinies rather than wait for editors to answer their queries, so calling them entrepreneurial journalists fits. What are these EJs doing? Creating news apps for iPhones and Androids. Working on the hyperlocal and nonprofit news ventures above. Creating technology platforms or providing the training journalists or newspapers need to their jobs better in the future.
The takeaway for freelancers: There’s never been a better time to start something on your own. The tools are abundant and free or close to it.  In cities such as Portland and New York, it’s relatively easy to find coworking spaces dedicated to writers or start ups or both. There’s also a wealth of information online and

Twitter - At the start of the year Twitter was still Facebook’s little brother, a circus sideshow fun for goofing off on but not really anything you could use for business. At least that was the perception. But as the year wore on and more publications and writers opened accounts, it became apparent Twitter could be used not just to research stories but tell them too. Dan Baum drove this point home when he took to Twitter to tell his tale of being fired from The New Yorker. If that wasn’t enough, there was always coverage of the plane landing in the Hudson, the Iranian election protests and Michael Jackson’s death to convince you Twitter had arrived as a news source.
Takeaway for freelancers: If you haven’t hopped on Twitter yet, now’s the time. Don’t worry about how you’ll use it, at least not at first. Give yourself some time to play around with it and see how things work. Then come up with a plan that fits into your writing business. You read more of my advice on how writers can use Twitter on this blog post and this one.

Other trends: the wave of online-only startup publications on all matter of subjects will increase; blogging will remain big; more publications and writers will experiment with mobile apps; and writers will see publications’ freelance budgets increase, though not all will return to pre-2008 levels.

Got your own picks for the major media industry trends of the past year?

I’ll weigh in on my picks for the highlights and low points of the freelance business during the past year in the next few days.

But first, a present. I’d just started wondering what to write this week that would get people pumped for the possibilities the new year will bring – and I’m optimist there will be a lot of them. Then I read something that reminded me of an email I got right before Christmas. An old friend had sent me a copy of a free e-book from Internet marketer Seth Godin called What Matters Now. I didn’t have time to read it before. But I today I did – and it’s just what I was looking for.

Godin, who’s written numerous marketing books over the last decade, asked 70 people – writers, thinkers, Internet gurus and more – to come up with one word they want people to think about in 2010 and explain why they picked it.

The 82-page booklet is best read like one of those daily inspiration calendars – a little at a time. Wired Editor Chris Anderson expounds on atoms, management expert Tom Peters on excellence, and money makeover radio show host Dave Ramsey on intensity.

Like it? Share it. It’s free and, as usual, Godin’s doing his best to make sure it goes viral.

Because goodness knows we could all use a little encouragement after the last 12 months.

Do you hear it?

That quiet noise in the background?

It’s almost imperceptible, but it’s there. That little buzz.

It’s the sound of innovation.

Everywhere I turn these days, I’m running into writers quietly working on projects. In their home offices. At the coffee shop with their laptops. In the group that’s huddled at the back of the regional journalism conference.

If I had to pick an indicator of whether or not the media business is bouncing back, this would be it. I’m not talking about newspapers and magazines going back to their glory days. That’s not going to happen. But something is happening. My evidence:

• A former wire service colleague is researching a website project for a consumer-oriented organization.
• Another colleague just pitched a blogging-related start up to a tech venture group in her area.
• Here in Portland journalists and ex-journalists are involved in at least two efforts to form non-profit news organizations.
• A similar effort is in the works in Colorado.
• Another Portland journalist is working on a web-based news aggregator.
• A few other Portland journalists are involved in so many different projects I can’t keep track, including one who dropped out of college because he had too many things going on.
• Several writers on a message board I frequent are investigating opportunities to create mobile apps, either with established publishers or on their own.
• Another freelancer I’m familiar with recently tweeted that she had a great idea for a mobile app, if only she could find the money to build it.

Writers are taking fate into their own hands because face, it, those newsroom jobs aren’t coming back any time soon. There’s something about a rough economy that brings the entrepreneur out in people in every field, and writers are no exception.

Because they’ve already figured out how to work for themselves, freelancers may have a leg up on newly displaced journalists when it comes to doing their own thing. Either way, there’s only so much rejection you can take from editors whose freelance budgets have been cut back to nothing before you start figuring out other ways to make a living.

I’m about to embark on a project of my own. It’s a start up of sorts, though it’s not my start up. But it is something new for me. When the time’s right I’ll be able to share more. For now, all I can say is it’s exciting to be doing something new.

What about you – got a project up your sleeve? If you could embark on something new right now, what would it be?