• 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.

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.