• 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 the heart of the controversy is a simple question: are bloggers reporters? The city of Lake Oswego doesn’t think so, and is taking steps to keep bloggers out of certain city meetings.

As the Oregonian explained in this story about the situation, the state’s open meetings law allows reporters to attend a city council’s or school board’s otherwise off-the-record, executive sessions when a handful of topics are being discussed such as personnel matters or land deals. The Lake Oswego city council decided in August that Mark Bunster, the author of a local political blog called Loaded Orygun, wasn’t a reporter and therefore couldn’t attend its executive meetings. One reason for the stand: there wouldn’t be any responsible party to complain to if Bunster broke the confidentiality agreement and reported on what was said in the meetings. The Lake Owsego city attorney is investigating the situation and is supposed to give the council his report this week. One possibility being explored is issuing some type of credential, but press advocates are concerned that the hoops a lone blogger/reporter would have to jump through in order to get a credential would take so long they wouldn’t be able to attend executive sessions on short notice.

With more news being written and produced outside traditional publishing venues of newspapers and magazines, it’s getting harder to define what a news organization is, and subsequently, who a reporter is. The situation will only get more complicated as more long-time newspaper and magazine staff writers are pushed out, take buy-out packages or leave of their own volition but continue doing the same type of work for blogs such as Talking Points Memo, non-profit news organizations like the Center for Investigative Journalism or privately funded investigative Websites such as ProPublica or on their own blogs or Websites.

The writers and bloggers who work for such organizations haven’t changed what they do, just where their work is published. Does that make them any less of a reporter? It’s the same question freelancers have had to contend with for years – just because we aren’t on staff somewhere, does that make us something less than “real” writers? Hardly.

But what about bloggers who never worked for a newspaper or magazine but are covering Paris Hilton or Lindsey Lohan, are they reporters? What if they cover community news, tech start ups or the presidential election? Should they get credentials to meetings and events?

Speaking as a long-time reporter, freelancer and blogger, I say, yes, they should.

What do you think? Have you run into similar situations in your state?