Here are some of this week’s more engaging entries:

Why stagnation is worse than writers block and what to do about it – Writers tend to believe any work is better than no work – especially when there’s not a lot of it coming in. But freelancer Meredith Resnick takes issue with that. She argues that “make work” – assignments that keep you occupied and help pay the bills but don’t stretch your abilities – can block real creativity and learning. Think about that for a minute. If you’re busy taking assignments that don’t require much brain power just for the money you may never get around to the writing you really want to do. Smart advice. Maybe the answer is taking enough assignments to pay the bills but leaving a block of time every day or week for those dream projects.

Drink from the fountain of youth – Freelancers need to have young souls, says writer and poet Brandi-Ann Uyemura. You don’t have to be young to have a young soul, Uyemura says, but you do have to be willing to greet the world “with arms and hearts wide open.” She writes:

Before you take that next job think about how much you really want it, then step forth open-hearted and express the kind of excitement and passionate that can only come from a young soul. Then, just see how far you go!

Ditch what’s dead – Christa Avampato was a blog-post-a-day writer even before joining this year’s WordCount blogathon. This year, the New York City writer, innovation and product development expert and yoga aficianado is using her blog, Christa in New York, to list 365 steps she’s taking to build an extraordinary life. Step no. 132 – ditch what’s dead. Picking the dead leaves off impatiens plants brought home how many other dead-end things Avampato let hang around, and why passions, like plants, can come back to life with a little careful pruning.

10 tools to back up your social media – As someone who uses and writes about social media, I’m always interesting in hearing about new apps. This list from writer/blogger Tracy Doerr includes a bunch for backing up a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other online social networks.

Here comes the groom – Finally, props to Andrew Nielsen over at A Green Mushroom, his blog about gaming. Nielsen managed to stick to the blogathon grind despite a little date he had at the altar last weekend. Yes, he got married and his blog didn’t miss a beat. How’s that for dedication?

I finally met Arianna Huffington four years later. I was writing a column about politics and the Internet for Reuters and covered a speech she was making at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. By then Huffington was divorced, on her way to eventually severing ties with the Republican party, and on the stump to promote her latest book, Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom. She was as knowledgeable, articulate and mesmerizing as advertised.

Today, Huffington is famous – or infamous, depending on who you talk to – as the founder and chief creative power behind The Huffington Post, the influential news blog. Even before her Internet days, Huffington was not shy about promoting herself or her latest venture. That’s crystal clear in a new profile of her, The Oracle, The Many Lives of Arianna Huffington, by Lauren Collins, published in the Oct. 13 issue of The New Yorker.

Ten years ago, Huffington was already talking about the Internet’s potential power in politics. Here’s what I wrote in that Reuters column:

Today’s Internet-using pols still number a tiny minority. But that should grow as they learn how to exploit the medium to mobilize voters around issues they care about, said Arianna Huffington, the noted pundit. “The more they’re for the status quo, the less likely they’ll be to use it,” Huffington said. “The more politicians who are reformers, the more they’ll use the power of the Internet. We haven’t even begun to scratch its potential for communications in politics.”

Check out that last line again. Huffington wouldn’t launch her namesake Website for another seven years. But it’s clear she knew she was onto something.

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?