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.

What is Digital Journalism Camp? According to Abraham Hyatt, a friend and fellow Portland freelancer who’s organizing it:

This isn’t about bloggers vs. reporters, or old media vs. new media. We’re all on the same team. And this conference is about how we, as journalists, are innovating right now — what’s working, what’s not, and how we can get better at what we do.

As of this afternoon, close to 120 reporters, writers and other media types were registered – good for networking!

I’m will be moderating a 10 a.m. panel on hyperlocal news with panelists from The Portland Sentinel, NeighborhoodNotes.com and CapitolHillSeattle. Then at 11 a.m., I’ll be teaching a class on journalism basics, including finding sources, fact checking and making corrections.

Because this is a camp style conference, and because it’s Portland and even the journalists here are tech geeks, there’ll be an unconference going on in one of the rooms all day – which means in the morning, everyone who’s there will collectively decide what topics will be covered in that space.

• Here’s the complete schedule.
• Here’s a list of speakers, panelists and moderators.
• Here’s where to sign up.

If you can’t be there, you can follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #journpdx – I’ll be tweeting from the conference, though not during my own presentations.

You can follow @journopdx now for updates in advance of the conference.

See you there.

Hyperlocal news is a catch-all phrase that describes websites or blogs devoted to covering a city, town or neighborhood, or a specific beat within a city or neighborhood like biking, books or tech start ups. Think of them as the 21st century equivalent of the neighborhood paper you used to pick up on the street corner, or the weekly paper your parents subscribed to so they could read about your high school sports teams.

Hyperlocal news ventures have popped up around the country, and I’ve mentioned several successful ones here before, including SealBeachDaily.com and NewzJunky.

If you’re interested in learning more about hyperlocal news, and you live within driving distance of Portland, plan now to attend a panel discussion on hyperlocal news I’m moderating at Portland’s Digital Journalism Camp on Saturday, Aug. 1.

Digital Journalism Camp PDX is a free one-day conference on the future of journalism and what it means to media practitioners. To date, close to 85 journalists, bloggers and freelance writers have signed up to attend.

Camp-style conferences - very popular right now in tech circles – are less formal than traditional conferences and normally include a mix of sessions on pre-determined topics along with sessions conference goers choose once they get there.

Organizer and Portland freelance writer Abraham Hyatt is still putting the finishing touches on the Digital Journalism Camp agenda. But the day is likely to include discussions of digital storytelling, podcasting, SEO for journalists, new media revenue models and more.

The hyperlocal news panel I’m moderating will feature proprietors of three ventures in Portland and Seattle:

• Cornelius Swart, publisher and managing editor, Portland Sentinel, a neighborhood newspaper in North Portland with a strong online component.
• Ken Aaron, co-founder, Neighborhood Notes, a news and entertainment site that covers Portland’s four quadrants.
• Justin Carder, Neighborlogs, a Seattle hyperlocal news site.

For a little preview of what we’ll be talking about, here’s Justin Carder’s analysis of how much money he thinks he’ll make this year at Neighborlogs, roughly $14,000.

Digital Journalism Camp takes place Saturday, Aug. 1, 9:30 a.m. to mid-afternoon and will be held at The Oregonian (yes, we get the irony too), 1320 SW Broadway, Portland, Oregon 97201.

Even though it’s free, space is limited, so sign up early.

I’ll be posting more information about the camp as it’s available. You can also follow camp news on Twitter at @journopdx.

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.