The annual American Society of Journalists and Authors writers conference is taking place right now in New York. I went last year to give a presentation and meet fellow writers and editors. I was invited back this year but had to drop out when work got so busy I couldn’t afford the time away. But I’m still planning to follow along via Twitter. I suggest you do too.

Here’s how to use Twitter and TweetChat to learn what’s happening at ASJA:

1. Log onto your Twitter account.
2. Open a new tab in your browser and log onto TweetChat, an app that lets you track Twitter conversations by hashtag, and if you want to join in, automatically adds the appropriatehashtag to your tweets. To log on to TweetChat, you have to give the application permission to access your Twitter account – do this or you won’t be able to see the ASJA tweets.
3. Once you’re logged on, enter “ASJA2012″ in the search box at the top of TweetChat’s front page – that’s the official hashtag that ASJA is using for tweets related to the writers conference – and click on “Go.” TweetChat will automatically switch to a screen that shows you all of the #ASJA2012 tweets as they’re happening.
4. To ask someone a question or tweet something that everyone else monitoring the #ASJA2012 hashtag will see, type into the “Message to #asja2012″ box at the top of the screen. Because  TweetChat automatically adds the appropriate hashtag to your tweet, you’re message will need to be slightly less than 140 characters.
5. Wait a few seconds and your message will pop up in the #ASJA2012 tweet stream.
6. You can also use TweetChat to reply to or retweet someone else following the hashtag. You can also use it to favorite a tweet or look up the Twitter profile of someone who’s participating in the conversation.
7. Keep TweetChat open in your browser for as long as you’re interested in tracking the action.

Other interesting links for writers:

15 newsroom tools from CIR’s TechRacking conference (10,000 Words) - Google recently sponsored a day-long conference for 200 news types where, according to the 10,000 Words blog, one of the common themes was, “ If we have to do more with less, then technology has to make up the difference.” Some of those tools are mentioned in this post, including Wavii, an instant news feed that lets you follow topics you might be writing about, and SpeakerText,  a tool that works with the SoundCloud API and transcribes audio (goodbye transcription service).

Data Journalism Handbook – Speaking of hacks and hackers, this handbook was created during a 48-hour workshop in London in 2011 and was subsequently added to by major U.K. and U.S. news organizations. Use the website to add yourself to a list to be notified when the free web version of the book is out; an O’Reilly version is also coming soon.

75 ‘Write for Us’ pages (Freelance Writing Jobs) – Jackpot. The popular freelance blog made the hard work of looking for work a little easier by assembling this list of  print and online markets for freelancers. Some listings include rates – and truth be told, many of them them are pretty low. [[UPDATED @ 2:30 p.m. Friday, 4/27 - It's now been brought to my attention that this post is from 2010, a major fact I overlooked when I read through the information after seeing a link to it on Twitter earlier this week. I'm leaving it up, but be warned, the info is now pretty old.]]

 How tech’s giants want to reinvent journalism (PaidContent) – Current thinking on how news is and could be, from representatives of Google and Facebook.

Economics 101 (BizJournalism.com) – Online course on economics for freelancers and other journalists interested in reporting on business or brushing up on their skills. June 26-28 for an hour a day.

Eat My Shorts – This week the tagline I use for this standing Friday feature – to do great writing read great writing – is slightly misleading because some of the great writing I came across I didn’t read, I listened to. I’m referring to a segment on last week’s edition of PRI’s This American Life radio program. “Eat My Shorts,” co-produced with ProPublica calls into question the excuse heard a lot on Wall Street and in government hearings that nobody saw the financial meltdown coming. The piece does so by examining the actions of a hedge fund named Magnetar that figured out how to game the system – and made a mint doing it.

TAL fans will recall that Alex Blumberg, one of the investigative reporters on the project, also worked on the show’s now famous May 2008 segment, The Giant Pool of Money, which NYU recently called one of the top 10 journalism projects of the past decade. This 40-minute program is riveting, as fine a piece of explanatory journalism as you’ll get. It’s also a great example of how dramatic, influential, and dare I say even sexy, good business journalism can be.

ProPublica and the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes – Speaking of ProPublica, the five-year-old nonprofit investigative news agency walked away with the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. ProPublica reporter Sheri Fink took the award for her story Deadly Choices at Memorial, on life-and-death decisions made by doctors at one hospital during Hurrican Katrina. Fink won the honor in conjunction with the New York Times Magazine, which ran her piece.

ProPublica’s win marks the first time a nonprofit news organization has won a Pulitzer, recognized as the highest honor in U.S. journalism. It’s a big step for the New York-based outfit, and for the dozens of other nonprofit news organizations like it that are forming all over the country. Look for those organizations to use this a rallying cry for assistance, both from experienced journalists they hope will come to work for them as well as donations they hope to attract.

Read the entire list of 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners here.

Forbes just announced yet another layoff. Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek from McGraw Hill for a song. Fortune’s scaling back the number of issues it will produce next year. The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau. Advertising in other business publications has fallen precipitously. Carr suggests that a lot of what passed for business journalism was aspirational in nature, showing would-be captains of industry the prescribed formula to follow if they wanted to be the next Wall Street millionaire. Now that the mighty have fallen, he reasons, people have stopped caring about the the publications that praised them.

While I buy into the fact that the print business press has suffered what might be a fatal blow, it’s not the end of the world for business reporting.

For every Forbes or BusinessWeek that’s downsizing or sold, new publications are popping up online. New entities might not have the gravitas of the old ones. But they don’t have the overhead either. That might be bad in the short run – not as much money equals not as many resources to do investigative pieces or go after the important stories of the day. But at least they’ve got a better shot at living to see another day.

Some of these new publications aren’t really new. One of the best business stories of the year was The Giant Pool of Money, a listener-friendly take on how we got into the present economic mess in the first place, that was a collaboration between NPR and American Public Media’s quirky radio show This American Life. It was such a hit NPR is now teaming up with local public broadcasters on EconomyStory.org, a website that will showcase all the parties’ economy-related reporting.

Other new outlets for business news are starting up all the time. Two I’m acquainted with because I’ve done some work for them: MoneyWatch.com, created by CBS earlier this year, and a still in beta start-up on personal finance for women.

The old guard of online business news, sites such as MarketWatch.com, The Street, The Motley Fool and CNNMoney are still going strong, as are newer outfits such as VentureBeat and The Business Insider.

So, while some of the big glossies might be fading into the sunset, the genre can hardly be said to be dying.

If you cover business, where’s your work coming from these days?

That’s the take away from a post on teaching multimedia storytelling techniques to reporters written by Anita Malik, deputy director of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University.

Among her other duties, Malik travels around the county presenting training workshops to newspaper journalists, including seminars on creating multimedia story packages. As a result, Malik says she encounters lots of writers who mistakenly hang onto the belief that multimedia isn’t journalism, that it’s some kind of add on that couldn’t stand on its own. Not true, Malik writes. “Whether it is video, a podcast or a blog posting, each element must be able to stand on its own and be balanced just as a print piece would be. The standards and ethics of good reporting still apply.”

When it comes to blogging, Malik believes that some day all reporters will blog in some fashion. She writes: “As witnessed recently in the coverage of the Wall Street turmoil, blogs are the predominant medium for breaking news. Blogs are, in fact, the prevailing format for online stories, and in some ways, stories and blog postings are almost interchangeable.”

Read her entire column at Multimedia Myths.

Malik writes regularly at BusinessJournalism.org, the online home of the National Center for Business Journalism. It’s worth checking out, even if you aren’t a full-time business writer. The site lists a variety of seminars, workshops and tutorials – paid and free – on business news reporting that the school offers around the country or online. It also lists a variety of resources useful to business reporters as well as jobs for business writers.