You may be too late to order a box lunch. But you aren’t too late to show up for the all-day discussion of what it would take to create a new, non-profit news organization covering Portland and Oregon. Tickets are $25.

If you attend, you’ll be among 100+ practicing journalists, community activists and plain old citizens expected to be there. I’ll be one of them.

Portland is one of dozens of cities where hyperlocal news sites have started or are being started as newspapers and TV news lose readers and ad revenue. Just this week, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar announced plans to launch a local news service in Hawaii in early 2010. In recent weeks and months similar enterprises have been launched in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere.

If you can’t make it, you can still read the working papers the group published in advance of the conference to set out its thoughts and hopes for what a Portland nonprofit news site could be.

You can also follow the conference on Twitter at @wemakethemedia or #wemakethemedia.

The show, called “The Rebirth of Local Journalism,” airs live tomorrow, Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 9 a.m.

I’ll be one of the guests on the show, along with several other Portland and Oregon journalists who’ve made it their business to keep tabs on the local media scene.

The WeMaketheMedia. com conference, which takes place at UO’s Turnbull Center in downtown Portland on Saturday, is looking at what it would take to start a non-profit investigative journalism initiative in the area. Even if you can’t attend, you can get a taste of what they’ll be discussing by reading these working papers the group’s organizers have put together in advance of the event.

If you miss the OPB live broadcast, you can catch a podcast of the segment after it airs. Once a link’s available I’ll include it here.

Those are two of six types of new journalists Northwestern University’s Media Management Center identified in a recent report, Life beyond print: Newspaper journalists’ digital appetite.

The Northwestern team surveyed 3,800 journalists working at 79 newspapers about their digital habits, “where they want their newsrooms and careers to go, and how well their leaders are doing in managing the tumultuous changes in the news industry.”

Based on their finding, the report placed journalists in one of six groups based on their desire for digital change. While the survey covered only journalists working at newspapers, I’ll wager the categories apply to freelancers as well. They are:

Digitals – Spend a majority of their time online. These are the Web rats who ruled at the recent Online News Association conference, 20somethings who dropped out of j-school to run an online news start up, coding whizzes who win awards for their news-related content management systems, and guys (and girls) who never worked in print in the first place.

Major Shifters – Spend lots of time online outside work and are frustrated they don’t do more online when they are. Think newsrooms need to “get on it and make a more ambitious shift” and would devote heaps more time toward that end if they felt it was worthwhile.

Status Quos - Like the little bear in Goldilocks, find the 30 percent of their time spent producing online news is just right.

Turn Back the Clocks – Long for a return to print. Represented 6 percent of journalists surveyed (good thing, cuz face it, it ain’t nevah coming back)

Moderately Mores – The largest contingent – 50 percent of total surveyed. Would like to double their current digital activities to get to an even split between working online and in print.

Leaders – High-level publishers and editors who typically spend more time focused on print but would like to shift more of their attention to online operations.

The survey results show a need for a reorganized hierarchy of talent, writes Alltop blog curator (yep, that’s her title) Noelle Chun. She observes:

While newsroom veterans provide invaluable editorial instinct and experience, young upstarts tend to bring the digital skills and fresh ideas. How can we soundly lead newsrooms in ambitious new ventures with diverse leadership and colleagues?

I’m not certain where I fit into this group. I’m no digital native, but I spend an overwhelming majority of my work day producing articles that will appear only online, online and in print simultaneously or first in print and then online. None of the publications I write for are print only (are any?) Some of the publications I write for have print issues but the work I produce is for their websites. Guess that makes me a Digital Status Quo.

Which new journalist are you?

Write on a regular basis, pick topics people care about and be upfront about relationships you have with sponsors.

That’s some of the advice I shared in a 3 Questions column I wrote in yesterday’s Orange County Register. The column is regular Sunday feature compiled by the paper’s real estate columnist and my former colleague Jonathan Lanser.

Read the whole thing here.

• Can the techies save the news? – If  the scene at the recent BarCampPortland III meet up was any indication, that could very well be the case.
• The Smalltown News – Small newspapers are in a better shape than big ones to survive the recession and changing news business, according to this story I did for Oregon Business magazine.
• Room to write – No office space at home but hate working in coffee shops? Portland’s got plenty of communal workspaces for writers, part of a nationwide trend of shared workplaces.
• WordPress user group forms - The more writers take to blogging, the more call there is for places they can go for training, and this group is one of them.
• Portland is for word lovers – It only follows that the city with the country’s best independent book store and most active public library system would host a rockin’ annual book festival. Wordstock is it.
• City debates whether bloggers are reporters – In a scene that’s starting to repeat itself across the country, the Portland suburb of Lake Oswego debates whether to allow a local blogger into city meetings.
• While other papers sink, the Oregonian swims – I wrote this before the paper’s latest rounds of job cuts and salary reductions. But Portland’s daily is still publishing seven days a week, isn’t in bankruptcy and has managed to keep some of the country’s top feature writers and sports columnists – these days, that’s saying a lot.

Standing up for writers – Today is the 2nd Annual Writers Worth Day. Lori Widmer, a Valley Forge, Pa., writer, dreamed up the campaign to help writers and other freelancers do a better job negotiating fees and standing up themselves. I’m down with that. As I’ve said here before, writing for free is not a business model.

Write On! Query contest – The southern California-based Write On! writers’ support group led by veteran freelancer Debra Eckerling is sponsoring a query contest with winners in screenplay, teleplay, fiction and non-fiction categories. First prize in each category is the opportunity to have a literary agent read your query, plus an iScript recording of the project and Save the Cat software.  Second and third prizes will be given in each category too. Entries are due by June 22 and winners will be announced July 7. Visit the website for more details.

Reporters go online, bloggers go to class – Membership in the Online News Association is up by a third this year as more old-school journalists retrain themselves in News 2.0, according to this Poynter Online report. Meanwhile, traditional journalism groups are changing their policies to allow bloggers and citizen journalists working in non-traditional media outlets to become members or take part in conventions and seminars.

Micropayments anyone? The Wall Street Journal will introduce a micropayment system this fall for individual articles and premium subscribes to its website, according to this Reuters piece. Good thing it’s the WSJ doing the experimenting. According to PaidContent.org, a new study on what news readers will pay for says beyond financial info, it ain’t much.

2009 Loeb Award finalists announced – UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Gerald Loeb Awards are awarded to the year’s best business news stories. Winners will be announced June 29. The bad economy, real estate industry meltdown and collapse of prestigious Wall Street firms figured heavily in this year’s competition.

Emailing in your blog posts – WordPress bloggers can now post new material to their blogs via email. The blogging software company rolled out a new feature this week that lets people post new material from an iPhone, Microsoft Outlook or anywhere else you can send email.

Twitter tools for journalists and writers:

• Tinker - This app claims to let you follow events people are talking about on Twitter or Facebook.
• 7 tips on using hash tags – From Erik Sherman’s WriterBiz blog.

Imprisioned U.S. freelancer ends hunger strike – Roxana Saberi, the freelance broadcast convicted of spying in Iran ended a two-week hunger strike after Iranian authorities agreed to hold an appeal hearing for her next week. The Iranian-American freelance broadcast reporter was arrested in January and convicted of spying in a closed-door trial in April. Saberi’s supporters have created a website, Free Roxana Saberi.

Congress holds U.S. newspaper industry hearings – Plenty of big names held forth on the future of the news business at a May 6 Congresssional hearing. As could be expected, presenters’ POVs varied. HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington was the optimist, declaring, “Despite all the current hand wringing about the dire state of the newspaper industry – well-warranted hand wringing, I might add – we are actually in the midst of a Golden Age for news consumers.” Ex-newspaperman turned Hollywood writer (“The Wire”) David Simon was much more downbeat, saying “High-end journalism is dying in America and unless a new economic model is achieved it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else.” Replay the entire Webcast here.

Is this what they had in mind? – The Chicago Tribune is working on a new Website called Chicago Now that could be a blueprint for the 21st century news ventures discussed at this week’s Congressional hearings. According to news reports, Chicago Now will combine elements of traditional news coverage with e-commerce, blogs, advertorials and social media. The new site is distinct from RedEye, the Tribune’s free daily paper for “young, urban professionals.” The Tribune and other Tribune publishing holdings filed for federal bankruptcy protection last December.

Other stories, items and websites of interest -

• 2009 Online News Association Awards categories – 14 categories, including four paying a total of $28,000 in cash prizes. Deadline for entries is June 30, 2009.
• The Center for Investigative Journalism is hiring reporters to staff a California investigative reporting initiative funded by $2.4 million in grants.
• The Boston Globe, Las Vegas Sun, ESPN.com and CNN.com each won two 2009 Editor & Publisher EPpy awards for outstanding news industry websites and blogs. See the full list here.
• Neighborlogs – a free service/website template for creating hyperlocal community news sites.
• 17 statistics for monitoring your blog – From ProBlogger.

Twitter tools -

• Tweetmeme – Like a Digg for Twitter, this service finds the hottest stories on the service based on the number of retweets.
• How to integrate Twitter into WordPress – A Web Designer Magazine tutorial that explains in 16 very code-y steps how to weave Twitter into a WordPress.com blog.
• Twitter Secrets – An entire blog dedicated to Twitter apps and tools.

Got Websites, news or tips about the digital media business to share? Send them to me: michellerafter (at) comcast (dot) net.

At last weekend’s BarCampPortland III meetup, the assembled developers, programmers and Web 2.0 entrepreneurs were just as concerned about the fate of the news business as the smattering of old-school journalists who dragged themselves out of bed for the bad coffee and good conversation.

The techies wanted to know all kinds of things: Why are newspaper headlines misleading? Will micropayments – the vending machine model for paying for news stories – work? Should bloggers hold themselves to the same ethical constraints as reporters? Just what are those ethical constraints? Should bloggers be reporters? Should reporters be bloggers? Is hyperlocal news making money? And just how hyper is your local?

All excellent questions. The free-flowing discussion that followed touched on a lot of them without providing a lot of answers, at least not any definitive ones. But it was a start.

If the number of tech-slash-news geeks at BarCamp was any indication, Portland is a hive of activity on the hyperlocal news front. No less than three online community news ventures were represented: Neighborhood Notes; OurPDX.com and The Portland Sentinel, a monthly paper in North Portland with a daily news website. In case you hadn’t heard, PDX TV station KATU is looking to hire a Web producer to write, curate and publish local stories on KATU.com.

BarCamp took place the day after The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., filed for bankruptcy protection, making talk of the future of the news all the more pressing. The Columbian sent a trio of newsroom staffers to BarCamp, including John Hill, the journalist turned journalism IT guy who wrote the ‘how hyper is your local’ blog post I linked to higher in this piece.

Guys like Hill, and Michelle Nicolosi, the executive producer at the newly only-only SeattlePI.com, and Kate Cohen and Donna Wares, co-bloggers at the SealBeachDaily community news site in California could be the salvation of the news business. They and a new breed of hybrid tech-news entrepreneur, like Steve Walling, a Portland writer and consultant who’s involved with projects like AboutUs.org and WikiProjectOregon.

Here in Portland, the conversation that started at BarCamp is continuing. As I write this, Abraham Hyatt, another Portland journalist who’s tracking the online news business, is planning a digital news meetup for sometime in August. Stay tuned for details. And tell a techie friend.

Web-only news awards watch – The Pulitzer Prizes, the Oscars of the journalism business, will be announced on Monday and for the first time Web-only publications are eligible. According to this Editor&Publisher article, at least five online news organizations submitted entries in the Web news category: the St. Louis Beacon, Voice of San Diego, MinnPost.com, ProPublica and Center for Independent Media. Winners will be announced at 3 p.m. EDT.

From a two newspaper to a two Website town? – One month after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer shut down its print operation and moved online only comes word of a second Web-based news enterprise in the Emerald City. A group of former PI journalists – not the same group still running SeattlePI.com – have launched a non-profit news site called SeattlePostGlobe.org. According to this Seattle Times story, the PostGlobe will be staffed by 20 former PI employees and will run on reader contributions, a la the public radio model. The enterprise is partnering with SeattleWeekly.com and the city’s public TV station, KCTS/9.

In case LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook aren’t enough – Journalists now have a social network to call their own. The UK-based Journalist Social Network reports signing up 600 writers in the first weeks of its launch. Like existing social networks, members can create profiles, read member blogs, watch videos and join interest groups. The site’s owned by London-based Chatter Ltd., which has launched 100 niche online networks. A quick peek at the site’s online forums showed chatter on Journalist Network was still on the light side.

How much is a blog post worth? – The Blog Herald has as detailed an analysis as I’ve ever seen on how much bloggers are paid to blog. It’s part of a series on blogging jobs the six-year-old blogging industry new site is running. It’s riveting stuff, and depressing. Nobody’s getting rich blogging on a fee-for-post basis, according to Lorelle VanFossen, the article’s author. Her conclusion:

If you want to blog for a living, don’t take just any blogging job or low paying jobs. It isn’t worth it. Get paid what you are worth so every blogger within the industry can get a chance to make a decent living and not be undercut by those blogging for $5 a post. Consider your expertise and ask for what you deserve.

Sign of the times – In case you needed any more convincing you should pitch queries elsewhere, U.S. magazine ad pages fell 26 percent in the first quarter, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Ad revenue and pages declined in the top 12 magazine advertising categories, according to the magazine industry research group.

More free ONA memberships – The Online News Association gave away 31 memberships to recently laid off journalists as part of its Support a Journalist campaign that ultimately looks to raise $90,000 for free memberships for displaced reporters. Get details about donating or applying to the program here.

Twitter tools of the week:

• Hootsuite – A Twitter app that lets you manage multiple accounts, pre-publish tweets and add multiple editors to a single account.
• Muck Rack – Another list of journalists on Twitter. This one’s brand new, still fairly small, and so far, only includes journalists working at major news outlets. The list can be sorted alphabetically or by outlet or links.

That’s the question of the day as the newspaper industry transforms itself, and the subject of a panel discussion this Friday, April 17, at the Portland City Club, a non-profit public affairs and research organization.

Panelists taking part in the debate include Peter Bhatia, executive editor of the Oregonian; Alan Stavitksy, associate dean at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism; and Charity Fain, the City Club’s executive director.

The lunch program started at 11:30 a.m. at the Governor Hotel, 611 SW 11th in downtown Portland. Cost is $16 for members and $20 for nonmembers. More information or online registration is available here.