It’s been five days since I got back from vacation and between blogging here and at SecondAct, and doing umpteen loads of laundry (read this post if you want to know why), I’ve been catching up on what’s happening in the freelance, writing and media business. Here are links to some highlights:

Writing

A Victim’s Tale: What it’s like to be on the receiving end of a press error (CJR) – Regret the Error blogger and CJR columnist Craig Silverman talks with an Akron, Ohio, man about how the local paper mistakenly reported that he’d fired a shot at a burglar rather than the other way around. “I’ve still got some faith in the paper, less than before, perhaps. But I wouldn’t trust that reporter to give correct movie times,” the man tells Silverman.

• Do Writers Read Differently than Non-Writers? (Jenny Hansen’s Blog)
• Writer Faster: 12 Top Tips for Freelance Writers (Productive Writer)
• Blog Burnout (Oregon News Incubator)

The Media Business

Why Do You Like Bad News? (Gizmodo) – The age of social network “Like” and “Favorite” buttons has created a paradox of people giving positive feedback to negative news. So be it, writes Mat Honan in this exploration of the nuances of non-f2f communication in the social media age. But “after you click that easy dumb little button, write a reply,” he says. “Say something. Use your human capacity for language. You don’t even have to say much. Just a little text. If you don’t know what to say, you can just say ‘sorry.’ It’s enough.

• How the Los Angeles Times is winning with social media (The Next Web)
• YourHub ‘s sobering case study about what happens when newspapers plunge into hyperlocal (Romenesko)

Meanwhile, another local news startup launched with a lot less fanfare but a no less ambitious plans.

OpenFile's Craig Silverman

That start up would be OpenFile, a Toronto-based service that’s borrowing innovations from other hyperlocal sites and weaving them together to create an open-source neighborhood news channe.

Journalists can use OpenFile to do the kind of grassroots community reporting commonly found on hyperlocal sites. Like Spot.us, the general public can use OpenFile to suggest stories they’d like reporters to follow up on, a bottom up approach to news that’s getting a lot of buzz. Following yet other online news operations, OpenFile will maintain topic pages, wiki-style entries that serve as backgrounders on specific subjects and act as traffic magnets.

One of OpenFile’s cofounders is Canadian journalist Craig Silverman, managing editor of PBS MediaShift, and author of Regret the Error, a book on newspaper corrections and a blog and Columbia Journalism Review column of the same name.

Silverman, who says he knew he wanted to freelance while he was still in j-school, is committed to using independent writers at OpenFile. He’s equally committed to paying more than the paltry fees content sites offer.

I talked to Silverman recently about OpenFile, the hyperlocal news business and his switch from freelancer to entrepreneur. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is OpenFile?

It’s very much about local news. We’re focused on getting neighborhood and street level news. We’ll cover city hall but only if it impacts a specific neighborhood and street. It’s also a collaborative news site. Anybody can go to the site and open a file. It could be they want to know why trees on their street are getting cut down. An editor would review it, determine if it’s a valid story, and if it is, assign a journalist to investigate. The idea is for ideas to come from the community and we’ll act on them. There’s another distinguishing characteristic. As a file goes live and the reporter develops their reporting, they’ll share that on the site. We’re opening up the process. Readers can help build out files by submitting a photo or links to city documents. From there it turns into a topic page about that issue, not just a story.

That sounds like the wiki pages journalists such as Robert Niles have suggested news organizations put on their sites to take advantage of stockpiles of information they have and to keep eyeballs coming to their sites.

The idea of topic pages has been talked about and implemented by media organizations going back a few years. There are products like Daylife you can purchase to create and populate pages based on keywords. That’s a model with almost no human interactive. We’re about creating curated topic pages that are good for traffic and good for giving people an overview. Wiki entries have turned out to be tremendously popular backgrounders that constantly evolve. We expect reporters to interact and take advice from people within the community. They can’t take on a story and not listen to what other people are saying.

Are you working with freelancers?

We’re doing traditional pay for writing with a rate comparable to what newspapers in Canada pay, $200 for 400 or 500 words. On top of that, we’ll pay performance based bonuses like the ones that have become popular at places like Examiner and Gawker. Right now we don’t have a performance metric but we will have a bonus based on page views. If we expect freelance writers to constantly update topic pages, we have to give them an incentive to do that. So we’ll pay for initial reporting but we expect them to stay with it and we have a reward stucture for that. Aside from the pay, if we’re going to cover a large and diverse area like Toronto, there’s no way an online-only property could have a staff of 50. But if you look at the way the workforce is changing and the field is changing, more journalists are out there.

Have you had much success finding people?

We have yet to do an all-hands-on-deck freelance call. Between me and the editor in chief we know a fair amount of writers and are going to people we know. We have one intern in our office who started talking to us on Twitter and asked if there was work.  The people who show an interest, who step up and pitch something, that’s who we’re working with. We want to find people who are excited about this. If we need to build a larger pool there are easy ways of doing that. We have a national organization for freelancers in Canada and there’s a popular email list for Toronto writers and editors. There are a lot of places to go.

Since you’re in the hyperlocal news business, what’s your take on Yahoo’s deal for Associated Content?

The first thing I thought was it was defense against AOL’s Patch and Demand Media. For a while there was debate about whether content mills were for real, whether the business model was sustainable. A lot of people in the industry looked at this deal and thought, I guess it is for real. You’ll see Demand, Yahoo and AOL battle it out for that place where content is produced quickly and cheaply to draw in search traffic.

How can a site like Open File compete? Do readers even care about superior content any more?

There is an argument to be made for quality. But just because you have a professional write something doesn’t mean it’ll be better off than a hobbyist writing for Demand or AOL. They have to deliver value in what’s there. When it comes down to neighborhood level news, I don’t see these guys, except for Patch, playing in that area. They’re going after web surfer traffic. But when it comes to bike lanes in a specific city and how they affect  streets, I don’t see those sites scaling down to that level. For us, we’re doing is location. We’re geotagging everything on the site. The idea is for a reader to have a customized page based on where they live or work that shows everything going on around them: local news, crime. What you see on Open File today is a beta, and in three or four months the site’s going to change fairly dramatically.

You’re a long-time freelancer. How did you decide to help start a media company?

I’ve always viewed myself as an entrepreneur. I tell people I run a freelance writing business. Writing’s great, that’s the reason I do it, but I’m a businessperson. As a freelancer, you won’t be successful if you can’t get your mind around the fact that you’re running a business. That said, my involvement with OpenFile represents a major shift. I’ve always run my own thing and now I’m on a team running a start up. The plan is for me to transition to be a full-time person, so it represents the end of my freelance adventure. I might have to have a bottle of wine one night and come to terms with that. It’s so much your identity. I chose freelancing, it didn’t choose me. I didn’t suddenly lose a job. Back in journalism school I liked the idea of being a freelancer. The chance to do this start up was the one thing that could have made me want to leave. As of right now, I work part-time for OpenFile, part time for MediaShift and do a bunch of other freelance. Over six or eight months, I’ll start dropping more and more things until I get to the point I’m full time at OpenFile. Or things could go insane at the site and it’ll be four months. But it’s going to happen.

How can other writers make the jump from freelancer to entrepreneur?

If eventually you’ll be in an office, you need to find people you could see yourself working with all the time. You also need to find people who rather than just offering financial backing or branding have a hunger and passion for whatever you’re doing. That’s also what I tell people when they’re considering freelancing. You have to be passionate about it or you won’t be successful. If you’ve been a freelancer and you’re passionate about it, you have to do an internal check to find out if you’re passionate enough about a new project to leave freelancing. For me, this is an ideal scenario. We raised the money roughly around Christmas time, so I knew as of New Year I would be in transition to working there. Right now it’s a period of leaving things off nicely with editors I’ve worked with for a long time. That’s so frightlening as a freelancer because you work so hard to build up relationships and you want there to be those connections because, who knows what could happen.

For me the new job is fun because it’s  very much linked to freelancing and that’s why I’m working with them. They realize the importance of freelancers and have tried to make sure there’s someone on staff looking at the contracts we’re creating with them in mind. I helped devise the way we’re paying people. In our contract, we’re not taking all rights in all media. We’re asking for a small window of exclusivity for online and mobile rights. We encourage writers to do what they want to do in print and if they think a story could turn into a feature of a couple thousand words, do it. We hope they’ll come to us first and in some way incubate the idea. We’re trying to be freelance friendly in a world that’s going in the other direction.

UC Berkeley j-school can’t find a dean – Sounds like candidates and students are ready to move the school’s venerable j-program into the 21st century but old guard faculty aren’t 100 percent on board, leading to a longer decision-making and interview process than candidates were willing to put themselves through.

That’s no typo – John McIntyre, long-time copy desk chief at the Baltimore Sun and the red pencil behind the You Don’t Say grammar column is leaving. I picked Your Don’t Say as one of the best blogs for writers in 2008 so am especially said to see him go. (Stay tuned for the 2009 list of best blogs for writers coning soon.)

New media training wheels – Webbmedia Group’s new media Webinars have proven so popular with newly unemployed journos and other writers the company’s creating an online community to carry on its mission of educating the ink-stained class in the ways of Web 2.0. The new Knowledgewebb site has live chats and message boards as well as plenty of online training sessions. Annual subscription is $129, or $80 if you’ve ever attended a Webbmedia Webinar before. Look on the site for more details.

This week’s online news link love:

• So you’ve been scammed – Advice from Bizzia freelance writing biz blogger Allison Boyer on what to do if you’ve gotten stung in a freelance writing scam.
• Regret the error – Reports on corrections, retractions, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the media. The blog’s the creation of Craig Silverman, a Montreal-based freelance journalist, CJR columnist and author of the book Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech .
• Happy birthday Freelance Writing Jobs – The reliable source of how-to articles and job listings turns four.

Twitter tools:

• Twitter homepage highlights search: The microblogging service tweaked its front page by positioning a new Search window high up in the right-hand column along with Following list. The tools column also has a collapsible Trending Topics list making it easier to see hot topics people are tweeting about.
• Twitter Guys make Time’s Most Influential People in 2009 list – Ashton Kutcher, who famously rode the Twitter craze to become the service’s first Millionaire – first member to hit  1,000,000 followers, that is – wrote the profile.