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.

Several freelancers have signed on after having read about the blogathon on Twitter – welcome! It’s not too late to join us. Just leave a comment on this blog or email me at michellerafter (at) comcast (dot) net.

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I sat in on some great discussions of the future of news and the role journalists and bloggers can play in it at the 3rd annual BarCampPortland yesterday at CubeSpace, the shared work environment on S.E. Grand Ave. It was a lively discussion, which I plan to expound on this week. Until then, you can read what John Hill, a journalist who works at The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., thought about it in his blog post, called How hyper is your local?

The tech crew behind BarCampPortland is doing its part to get the conversation rolling by extending an open invitation to local reporters, writers and bloggers to attend the city’s annual tech industry meetup, which takes place this Friday and Saturday, May 1-2, at CubeSpace, the S.E. Portland shared work and meeting space.

According to BarCampPortland cohost attendee Aaron B. Hockley, while many old-school news types still don’t get the whole RSS, Twitter and Web 2.0 ball of wax, “There are a lot of folks in the digital world interested in helping journalists understand the new media.”

Hockley and company are hoping to continue the discussion about the future of local journalism that started at the recent City Club Forum presentation on the same subject.

If you haven’t been to a BarCamp before, think of it as an unconvention. Unlike meetings where every minute is tightly scheduled in advance, BarCampPortland will have a general agenda but participants will decide exactly what gets covered when, basically making it up as they go. Here’s a video that explains how it works.

According to Hockley, the news industry discussion will most likely take place on Saturday, May 2, between 9 a.m. and noon. In the weeks leading up to BarCamp, announcement of the discussion already has local journos sharing their thoughts on the future of news, including opening up the news gathering process to the community.

BarCampPortland III runs Friday, May 1 from 6 to 10 p.m. and Saturday, May 2 from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. and admission is free. CubeSpace is located at 622 SE Grand Ave, Portland, 97214. Register here.

If you can’t attend but what to follow what’s happening, use the keyword BarCampPortland to search for blog posts, pictures and Twitter feeds.