If you’re a Portland area writer, help us make merry at a holiday gathering on Monday, Dec. 19, at McMenamins Tavern & Pool on NW 23rd. The fun starts at 6:30 p.m. No need to RSVP, just show up – although if you are planning to attend I’d love to know so I can watch for you.

Besides a healthy smattering of freelancers, expect to see journalists from the local Society of Professional Journalists chapter, Oregon News Incubator, Online News Association, Oregonian, (Vancouver) Columbian, Neighborhood Notes and other hyperlocal news organizations.

Here’s the address:

McMenamins Tavern & Pool
1716 Northwest 23rd Avenue, Portland, OR 97210
(503) 227-0929

A crowd of about 150 or so media professionals and just plain folks attended part or all of the conference, which was created to explore the feasibility of starting a nonprofit organization to cover local news. Many of them have already weighed in with their views, which are all over the map.

There are those who thought the conference, put together by a handful of long-time Portlanders with roots in local media and public affairs, excluded – accidentally or otherwise -  groups that are chronically under-served by the state’s existing media, specifically people of color.

There were also those who railed against how it was structured, with participants who didn’t listen to each other and led by a handful of Boomer and older journalists who aren’t as hip to Twitter et al as their Gen Y counterparts, a techno divide that got bigger as the day wore one.

There were also those who’ve made the rounds of local or national digital journalism conferences over the past year or more and are tired of talking about problems and just want to get on with implementing some solutions.

While I started out as one of the panelists, by the end of the day I’d joined “the corner,” a group sitting in the back of the room near the electrical outlets so they could take notes on their laptops and use Twitter to broadcast meeting updates to people who couldn’t be there, and yes, I’ll admit it, crack jokes and grouse about things they heard and didn’t like.

It’s all well and good to argue about who did what at the meeting or who didn’t respect whom. For me, what it all comes down to is the work. As one of those people who’s been going to these ‘future of news’ presentations for the past six months and written about it for the past two years, I too am ready to stop talking about it and get things done.

Which is why I spent the better part of Saturday with the conference goers who wanted to discuss creating a network of independent, entrepreneurial journalism ventures that could collaborate in some way on a regular basis. What this organization could look like, how the participants would collaborate and how it would be funded is TBD. But as discussed by the 20-plus people who spent a couple of hours hashing it out, it could take several shapes, including some or all of the following:

• A loosely affiliated group of journalists and bloggers, each with their own specialty or beat that would run their respective websites, blogs, email newsletters or other publications, and possibly also contribute some or all of their work to a larger online publication or site.
• A physical co-working space specifically for reporters who want to work someplace other than their home offices some or all of the time
• A social support group that would meet regularly to brainstorm, share advice and commiserate.
• A group that could barter editorial services – my copyediting for your videography or Ruby on Rails development.
• A partnership that could compile and sell its work to other news outlets through some type of syndicate.

Exactly how such a conglomeration would be structured, governed, paid for and operate is yet to be determined. But I like the concept. And it’s something I’m willing to pursue.

The group that worked on this idea on Saturday ended up calling it an incubator. For better or worse the name’s stuck. They also decided the city doesn’t need another new journalism group holding another monthly meeting to hash things out. Instead, they’re opting to piggyback onto the Digital Journalism Portland meetings that are already going on.

If you like the sound of a Portland journalism incubator and want to learn more, get involved – especially if you’re already working as an entrepreneurial journalist or have space to offer or some other goods or services to throw into the pot. Come to the next Digital Journalism Portland social hour. That’s set for Thursday, Dec. 3, 7 p.m., at the Rose & Thistle pub on N.E. Broadway. Get more details at the Digital Journalism Portland blog.

Meanwhile, the conversation about an incubator that started on Saturday is ongoing, in a Google Group set up specifically for the purpose. Anybody can join at WeMaketheMedia.

The incubator wasn’t the only idea to bubble up from Saturday’s gathering. According to meeting organizer Ron Buel, separate groups will be working in coming weeks on initiatives on investigative reporting, preserving traditional journalism values, and possibly, creating an agency to disseminate Oregon state public records to media organizations in a more timely fashion that exists today. To find out more or get involved with those groups, contact eharris@opb.org or ronb@donavoncards.com.

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.

The first Digital Journalism social hour takes place Thursday, Sept. 24, at 7 p.m., at the Lucky Lab pub in S.E. Portland. See this post on the Digital Journalism blog for an address, map and more details.

Hyatt had been searching for a way to keep up the momentum created by the inaugural Digital Journalism Camp, a day-long conference with sessions that covered multimedia story telling, hyperlocal news and more and was attended by about 150 local reporters, editors and other media types.

According to Hyatt, the SPJ was interested in getting into the picture and wanted to start sooner rather than later, thus the short notice for the first gathering.

The Sept. 24 social hour will feature a presentation on Portland Media Lab, a digital journalism venture started by Portland Sentinel publisher Cornelius Swart. Hyatt and SPJ’s Libby Tucker are lining up guest presenters for later meetings.

In case you can’t make it next week, mark your calendar for the next meeting, which is slated for Thursday, Oct. 29, at the same time and location.

Between meetings, follow Digital Journalism news and happenings on Twitter at @journopdx.

A crowd of more than 100 reporters and bloggers showed up for Digital Journalism Camp in Portland on Aug. 1. Everyone was there to figure out how they fit into a media industry that’s shifting away from old revenue and distribution models to new ones that aren’t yet clearly defined.

While the publications are changing, the basic tools reporters use aren’t. Here are some favorite reporting tricks of the trade I shared with a group of journalists, bloggers, consultants, PR reps and others at session called Journalism 101. You can see a slightly different version of this on the conference wiki here.

Read other coverage of Digital Journalism Camp on Oregon Media Central and Burnin’. (Note: I’ll add a link to a video replay of the conference once I find it – if somebody has this info, please ping me.)

Journalism Basics – Research, Interviews and Crowdsourcing

1. RESEARCH

What to do when you get an assignment -

• Familiarize yourself with the subject – do background research , talk to people
• Read what else has been written about it.
• Step away from the computer – go, see, do – and take lots of notes.
• Find the best sources – have one source lead you to others.
• Use public records – Find these online but also courthouses, etc.

What to do when you’re researching story ideas –

• Go through the same processes you’d use to research an assignment.
• At interviews, ask extra questions that could lead to insights into new topics.
• Develop your news sense – tune into what’s happening around you.
• Read: 10 places to find story ideas.

2. INTERVIEWS

Do your homework

• Read up on subject first so you’re not wasting time asking about things you could have found out in your research.
• Always double check name, age, title, etc.
• Write down questions – Even Oprah and Barbara Walters do it.
• If you feel prepared you won’t be as nervous.

Don’t be afraid to look stupid

• Ask “Can you explain that to me?” – If you don’t get it, your readers won’t either

Don’t let your subject off the hook – If they’ve evasive:

• Call them on it – Say “That didn’t really answer the question” and ask again.
• Move onto something else and come back to it later.
• Don’t take no for an answer. Ask, “Why don’t you want to discuss that?”

Get more details than you think you need

• Your editor is bound to ask about the things you didn’t
• You never know what detail you’ll need when writing
• It could lead to another story

If you’re pressed for time, ask the most important stuff first

• Highlight any must-have info before you pick up the phone.
• Don’t hesitate to ask for more time – if they’re already on the phone, they might be more willing to keep talking.

Call or visit sources multiple times if you need to

• For longer pieces you might not be able to cover all the material in one shot
• To get the facts straight
• To get reactions to info you got from additional reporting

Read:

• Asking the hard questions: top 10 interview tips
• Prepping for the big one – A dozen ways to ace a VIP interview.
• Keeping sources on the subject
• Stalking the reluctant source – 10 secrets to get anybody to talk
• Prep work is key to conducting successful phone interviews

3. CROWDSOURCING

Sign up for Twitter and use it to find sources

• Follow people involved in things you write about, then DM them for an interview.
• Ask them questions directly, or tweet questions to your Followers.

If you report on business, use LinkedIn

• Use LinkedIn’s Answers section to find subject matter experts
• Post questions in the Answer section to find sources – always identify yourself as a reporter
• Use People and Companies sections to find sources

If you have a blog

• Post questions on blog posts as you would on LinkedIn.
• Create polls.

Read:

• A writer’s guide to getting the most out of Twitter
• How writers can use LinkedIn (Part 1)
• How writers can use LinkedIn (Part 2)
• The secret to my LinkedIn success
• New ways to used LinkedIn to find story sources

4. WRITING SHORT

• Leave in only the best stuff.
• Use lists, bullets (like these!) and other short cuts to tighten up copy.
• Write from the top down, cut from the bottom up.
• What can you cut? Read your story out loud to see.

Read:

• A few words about writing short
• 7 ways to cut a story that’s too long

Here are links to other posts on freelance writing basics:

• Freelance 101: Getting started as an independent writer
• 25 tips for better freelance writing
• What editors want from freelance writers
• Why freelance queries get rejected

Despite his youth, Walling took a very old fashioned path to get where he is today. Fresh out of high school, he took whatever paid writing work he could get, then followed his bliss and became so good at what he really loved doing someone paid him to do it.

In Walling’s case, that passion was wikis, the communally edited online encyclopedias. He started contributing to Wikipedia, the mother of all wikis, as a volunteer and became so proficient he turned pro upon landing a steady freelance gig with AboutUs.org, a Portland, Oregon, outfit that aims to create an editable, curated guide to the Web.

In the course of creating a career path, Walling has become a mainstay in Portland’s burgeoning tech scene, a funky brew of computer geeks and creative types, many digital natives like Walling with no technophobias to overcome to feel comfortable working entirely online. Walling helped start started Wiki Wednesday, a monthly user group meeting for wiki enthusiasts, and helps out with WikiProject Oregon and other local wiki groups.

Here’s what he has to say about his career, wikis and what digital natives can teach older freelancers looking to transform their own writing businesses.

What’s your background as a writer?
Most of my experience and training was in creative writing, poetry, short stories, it wasn’t journalistic writing. I was doing traditional freelance performing arts criticism: film, dance, literary, a little bit of food writing. I grew up in Vancouver, (Wash.) and early on freelanced for publications there, then moved across the river to Portland and did theater and film criticism for Willamette Week and a few others publications. I went straight from high school to writing.

You didn’t go to college. How did you get your first assignments?
My brother is also a writer and he was writing for a now defunct alt-weekly in Vancouver. He knew the editor needed freelancers and I had extensive theater knowledge and could write. It was start up and they didn’t want to use Portland writers. I became a regular writer for them. Then I moved into the normal world of pitching editors and writing queries.

How did you get involved with wikis?
A teacher introduced me to Wikipedia in an AP History class. I sort of worked with it as a consumer. Then I saw the ‘Edit’ button and felt the compulsion to do things like add citations. I’ve always been passionate about encyclopedic subjects like history. I’ll read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and become interested in food.

How did you pick what you wanted to write about?
Whatever I wanted, that’s the beauty of Wikipedia. It’s very ad hoc.

Isn’t there already a lot of material?
It depends on the subject. On a Columbia River article, there was material there already, but after having become a wikipedian, I could tell there were gaps in the coverage and it needed citations. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit: on certain topics, articles don’t exist or only have a few sentences that would be easy to improve. Or you care about a subject and you tackle it and build up the quality.

Did anyone check your work?
It’s a constant system of live peer review. Every change on a project is logged in several places. So if you make an edit, the old version and current version are saved in a history you can access easily from that page.  There’s also what’s called recent changes stream, where every edit on the site gets logged into a long stream. Wikipedia is a pretty diverse place, it’s not just people interested in writing encyclopedia articles, but mundane tasks like checking for vandalism and checking the stream.

How did your volunteer work lead to paid gigs?
I met AboutUs.org at Wiki Wednesdays. I had no intention of pitching them for a job, I was happy with my regular freelance work. But they had one writer on staff and he was desperate to get someone else in to help. As Wikipedia is to encyclopedia articles, AboutUs wants to be to domain names and websites. So for Google, you’d have editable wiki pages things about Google’s domain, contact info, a summary of what the website is, a tag system to describe it. If you’re familiar with Whois, AboutUs aims to create a what is, a basic, user editable layer that tells you who a website is and what they’re related to. AboutUs is based in Portland and has been around for about 3 years. I joined in December 2007. I was and still am a contract employee, but spending the bulk of my work time writing for them. I have other freelance gigs, but they’re strategic consulting projects that grew out of my wiki work.

What kind of writing do you do?
If you search AboutUs for a website and it doesn’t exist in our system, the system automatically creates a page that becomes an editable wiki page. We have about 14 million pages in our database but only several hundred thousand have been actively edited by people. That’s growing 2,000 or 3,000 every day, minimum. If someone’s interested in having a richer AboutUs page but doesn’t want to learn the wiki technology, they can pay us to write the article and have it featured on the front page of our site one time, which is an SEO benefit. So I write articles about businesses. The articles are a middle ground between a Wikipedia entry and a press release. I also have other more technical duties, patrolling changes and that sort of thing. And I write posts for the company’s blog.

Where do you work?
Anywhere I happen to be, but I mainly work from AboutUs because it’s a pleasant office and even though I’m a contract writer I do a lot of work for them. We have about 30 to 35 full- or part-time employees and probably a half dozen freelancers.

How much do freelancers make for wiki work?
I can’t talk about the exact dollar amount.** AboutUs is different in the sense that we don’t act like a marketplace for freelancers. We don’t take pitches. We tell writers to write rich detailed content that makes the customers happy. They email back and forth with the customer to see if the article meets their needs. SEO is one of those needs but not the only one. We don’t penalize articles based solely on lack of keyword density. **(NOTE: AboutUs pays freelancers per article and not based on traffic; although Walling wouldn’t publicly discuss rates, my take based on his off-the-record comments is that their rates are somewhat to significantly higher than those paid by sites such as Associated Content or Helium. – MVR)

What kind of wiki consulting work do you do?
I work with businesses that have set up a wiki for their internal use and then realize wiki software isn’t just a new technology, it’s a new way of working and that challenges the norms of corporate life and the way people work together. People see the benefit to how it changes work flow – you don’t have to email documents all the time – but it can be slightly jarring. So businesses come to me to learn how to do it better and create a comprehensive strategy for doing that.

What’s your take on Portland’s media business?
Portland has a really vibrant community of freelance designers and programmers and start ups. It’s become much more diverse and we’re deeply interested in cultivating community as a group. There have always been the writer-tech hybrids, but now more writers who wouldn’t be interested in that sort of thing have been pushed by economic reasons into dipping a toe into the tech world. A lot of them out of necessity are developing a digital literacy to move into the next phase of how they’ll work.

What advice do you have for those writers?
Don’t be scared by the technology. Being a digital native made it easier, but I had to hack at it and work and spend my hours doing the legwork like any other job. The deeper I get into this as a creative person, the more I discover what I thought was intimidating wasn’t that hard. HTML or wiki mark up can sound scary to a traditional freelancer. But if you give it a try and are open minded you’ll discover it’s not as intimidating as you thought it would be. Also, it’s easier to grasp a new way of freelancing or writing if you get support from the community. As a freelancer it comes naturally to plug away at something by yourself. But the thing that’s helped me is plugging into this vibrant community and finding mentors who’d taken these steps already. So maybe you’ll have to change the way you’re working, but you won’t be alone.

• 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.

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.

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.