Freelance writers already possess many of necessary attributes, including an drive to be their own boss and willingness to jump into the non-writing aspects of the journalism business, including marketing and collections.

Portland Afoot Publisher Michael Andersen/Photo by Lee Van Der Voo

But spurred by the economy, hard times in traditional media and a wealth of cheap online publishing technology, some writers are taking self-employment one step further and started publications – not just hyperlocal news sites or blogs (though many use blogging software) but fully realized newspapers and magazines.

One of them is Michael Andersen, a Portland, Oregon, journalist and publisher of Portland Afoot, a print and online publication about the city’s buses, bikes and “low-car life.” The monthly print edition – Andersen calls it a “10-minute newsmagazine and wiki” – is currently available free to anyone who works in North Portland or downtown.

Andersen took a couple minutes off from his busy schedule recently to answer a few questions from WordCount about the trials and tribulations of starting a publication, hyperlocal news, and his favorite Portland bus line and walking route.

If you like what you read, stick around to the end of the post and find out how you can receive Portland Afoot for only $10 a year.

WordCount: How’d you come up with the idea for Portland Afoot?
MA: I was covering local government for a suburban daily newspaper and cranking out all these 700-word stories that were monkey screech to anyone who hadn’t been following local government news. I don’t know anyone who reads local government news every day except local government employees. Portland Afoot is designed to deliver one niche of government news (public transit) to one group of people who care about it (transit riders) in a quantity they can handle (10 minutes a month, with searchable evergreen information on demand).

WC: How is running a publication different from being a freelance journalist?
MA: I’ve only freelanced since I started Portland Afoot — it’s a way to keep the cash flowing — so it’s hard to say. Compared to local newspaper work, there’s a vast difference in the chance that someone will return my call. I now assume that 4 in 5 cold calls won’t get returned. At a newspaper I could bat .500 if I played my cards right.

WC: Do you have staff, and if so, what do you pay?
MA: It’s a nonprofit, so I report to a five-person volunteer board, and we’ve had a handful of other amazingly supportive volunteers. That’s it so far. I hired Rebecca Robinson, a friend and statehouse reporter, to do one 300-word interview with Rep. Jeff Smith. She got $30 and a batch of brownies.

WC: What’s been your biggest challenge so far?
MA: Budgeting my time. Having lots of things you can always do means that you’re constantly tempted to do the fun things. It’s very important to do the not-fun things, like convince people to give you money. That’s why people who do that get paid more than reporters.

WC: What have you learned about yourself?
MA: My flaws — distractability, shyness, thin skin, procrastination — didn’t magically go away. If I succeed despite them, it’ll be because of strengths I didn’t have, and couldn’t have built, while working at a larger company.

WC: AOL is hiring Patch editors all over the country, but Allbriton just pulled the plug on TBD, a high-profile news site covering suburban Washington D.C. What does that say about the future of hyperlocal news: will it last, and is there still a place for solo entrepeneur like yourself?
MA: I didn’t have time to check out TBD, so I don’t know what their content was like. I respect every local-news experiment, including AOL’s. But the key is brand depth. Here in Portland we’re lucky to have one of the country’s best and most successful local-news startups, BikePortland.org. I think Jonathan (Maus) would tell you the #1 key to his success has been brand-building. It’s taken him five years, but it’s his deep, hard-earned relationship with readers — not his pageviews, though they’re substantial — that earns premium prices from his advertisers.

WC: Your favorite TriMet bus line?
MA: The 85-Swan Island. Three reasons. (1) It feeds this industrial area where everybody works extremely regular shifts, meaning that there’s this iron-like camaraderie that you can feel when you get on. (2) The line was more or less singlehandedly created and protected by my friend Lenny Anderson. (3) Every month, we run a funny “Only on the Bus” story on our back cover. I’ve been sitting on one about the 85, told by local bus-driver celebrity Dan Christensen, until next summer. It’s that good.

WC: Best metro area hike?
MA: My favorite so far is Rocky Butte, which I visited on a trip with local hiking writer Laura Foster as part of the City of Portland’s Ten-Toe Express urban walking series last year. I’m going back with a young lady this Saturday, actually. I think my first book is going to have to be about car-free dating.

WC: Words of wisdom for entrepreneurial journalists who aspire to do their own thing?
MA: Portland-born phrase here: Just do it.

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Live in Portland, or just love the city? The first 5 WordCount readers who act can subscribe to Portland Afoot for just $10 a year with coupon code “WordCount.”

Others take self employment one step further and turn a solo enterprise into an honest-to-goodness company.

At a time when fewer publications are making assignments based on unsolicited queries and aggregators like Demand Studios, Associated Content and Helium are encouraging more amateurs to try their hand at creating web content, running your own show sounds pretty darn good.

Taking your freelance game to the next level doesn’t have to take a huge cash investment, though getting some ventures up and running definitely costs more than others.

Here are 10 writing-related businesses an enterprising freelancer could start today. Each includes examples of at least one writer who’s done it. I purposely included not-so famous writers – no Tina Brown or Arianna Huffington on this list – to make the point that you don’t have to start out rich and famous to make a go of it as a journalist entrepreneur.

Here’s the list:

1. Hyperlocal news – The equivalent of yesterday’s neighborhood newspapers, hyperlocal news sites cover what’s happening by the block, voting precinct, parish or or school district. These sites have become so popular you can do the work yourself or use hyperlocal news templates and advertising networks from companies such as Outside.in and GrowthSpur. That’s the good news. The bad news is major digital media companies like AOL and Yahoo have figured out there’s money to be made in hyperlocal and are working on their own initiatives, though how successful they’ll be remains to be seen. Examples of hyperlocal news sites started by a single writer or small group include:

• OpenFile – Read a Q&A I ran last week with co-founder and Regret the Error blogger Craig Silverman for more details about this Toronto start up.
• Portland’s Neighborhood Notes
• Tasha Does Tulsa

2. Training – Amy Webb spent 15 years covering emerging technology, media and cultural trends for Newsweek (Tokyo) and the Wall Street Journal (Hong Kong) before starting Knowledgewebb.net, a training company that teaches journalists the tools they need to succeed in the age of digital media. Today, Webb heads a team of trainers who hold webinars and travel the country teaching at conferences and providing in-person, one-on-one training. But you don’t have a staff to train other writers on WordPress, Twitter, or other technology. If you know enough about tech tools for writers to teach someone else how to use them, you could offer your services as a consultant, write e-books on the subject, or do like Boston-based The Urban Muse blogger Susan Johnston and teach blogging classes at a local community college.

3. City magazine – Books aren’t the only things the DIY publishing revolution has made it easier to bring to market. Online-based publishing tools have also made it easier for writers become print magazine publishers, as Portland freelance journalist Michael Robinson is discovering. Robinson just launched Portland A Foot, a small format magazine for the famously bike-friendly city’s “low-car” culture.

4. Customized wire service – Nozzl Media is to raw facts what AP is to news. Steve Woodward, a long-time reporter and editor at the (Portland) Oregonian took a company buy out and collaborated with two other ex-Oregonian reporters to create Nozzl Media. A cross between a wire service and a software app, Nozzl provides news websites with a constant stream of public records, social web conversations and other data they can customize to fit their particular location or niche. Since the service launched early this year, Nozzl has signed up The (Vancouver, Wash.) Columbian, The LundReport and ParkroseGateway.com. Nozzl isn’t the only company providing constant news streams. EveryBlock helped pioneer the concept and was subsequently acquired by MSNBC.com.

5. E-newsletter – Speaking of TheLundReport, Diane Lund is a Portland health-care industry watchdog who for years published a well-regarded monthly print newsletter covering the industry in Oregon. After some time away, Lund re-launched her efforts, only this time as a weekly e-newsletter with a matching website. Lund is a strong believer in nonprofit journalism and has structured TheLundReport accordingly. According to her website, since launching last year, she’s collected contributions from 100 supporters – with donations capped at $1,000 per person. She makes it easy for readers to donate by prominently displaying a Support the Lund Report page on the website. Though Lund writes a lot of her own stories, she uses freelancers on a regular basis.

6. Blog network – There’s power in numbers. That’s the philosophy behind blog networks, groups of blogs linked by a common theme. By aggregating content and traffic numbers, blog networks can go after companies that might not have been interested in advertising on a single property. BlogHer, which now has about 2,500 women-run blogs in its network, was started five years ago by former journalist Lisa Stone and two other partners and today competes with some of the largest women’s magazine publishers for Fortune 500 advertising dollars (Disclaimer: I’m a member of the BlogHer network. Examples of other blog networks include:

• NewWest.net – A news and blog network covering the Rocky Mountain West
• Cities on the Cheap – A network of 60 independent blogs run by freelance writers offering “insider information on your city’s best deals.”

7. Turnkey editorial services – Why let Demand and Helium have all the fun when you, too, can become a content aggregator. I’m not joking. Magazines, news websites, custom publishers have a constant need for fresh information and many would rather work with one source that can provide them with a steady, dependable stream of high-quality breaking news, feature stories or SEO-enabled web copy than deal with individual contributors. Some enterprising freelancers have figured this out and created editorial services companies to fill this need. One of them is Gina LaGuardia, proprietress of Gina LaGuardia Editorial Services, who not so jokingly calls herself a content pimp. LaGuardia started her New York City metro area-based company after a dozen years as a magazine editor and editorial director, and since then has handled content syndication management for AOL.com, MSN Encarta, the Internet Broadcasting System (IBSYS), WorldNow, Salary.com, BellSouth, and more. LaGuardia uses freelancers – a lot of them. I counted 28 on the GLES contributors page. If you’re super organized, have editing experience, contacts in the publishing industry and know a lot of freelancers, this could be for you.

8. Pop up website – In October 2008, Conde Nast laid off most of the editors who’d been working on Portfolio.com, the website for its then new-ish and since shuttered business monthly. Two of those suddenly jobless editors were Laura Rich and Sara Clemence, who were experienced enough business journalists to know a trend when they saw one. Along with a partner, they quickly built a website to track the personal and cultural fall out of the bad economy and called it RecessionWire, with the tag line “The upside of the downturn.” The founders dubbed it a pop-up site, after those retail stories that show up just in time for Christmas crowds and close once the post-holiday bargains are gone. The thinking behind RecessionWire and other pop-up sites is that the founders will keep them alive as long as the trend they cover lasts. However, in a March 2010 interview with BusinessWeek, Clemence said she thinks the site will live on, though with less frequent updates.

9. Netcasts – Leo LaPorte has been around the tech industry since the early days of the personal computer. After pitching shows to radio, TV and publishing companies with varying degrees of success, LaPorte used the advent of relatively cheap podcasting technology to start an Internet-based netcast called Twit.tv, and it’s paid off in spades. Today, Twit.tv consists of 15 separate shows covering some aspect of technology available via live streaming video and downloadable audio and video. Talking at the 2009 Online News Association conference last fall, LaPorte said he’s making approximately $1.5 million in advertising a year for shows that cost about $350,00 a year to produce, which he does with a staff of seven.

10. Creative services – To market themselves effectively in the age of digital media, writers need a website, blog, letterhead, business cards, Twitter background page, e-book design and so on. To make the best impression, all those marketing pieces should sport a common, professional caliber graphic design. Writers who are comfortable with HTML code or have a flair for design can do this work themselves. But many aren’t or would rather pay someone to do the work for them so they can focus on other things, like clients. That’s opened up an opportunity for freelancers with a degree of technical skill and design sensibility to provide creative services for other writers. Denver freelancer Ron S. Doyle started designing blogs and websites for other writers a year ago (Disclaimer: I’m a client). By the end of 2009, such work accounted for 40 percent of his income. So far this year, it’s up to 75 percent. Writers make up 80 percent of his business, but that number’s shrinking as he picks up work from other types of businesses. Doyle’s using web design as a base to branch into offering print and online marketing materials, online publicity campaigns, copywriting and video editing.Things are going so well he expects to add a business partner by March 2011, possibly sooner.

Are you a freelance writer who’s started a small business? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

It was the year conferences went digital, Twitter went viral and the bad economy made every writer a business reporter.

It was the year phrases like hyperlocal, meetup and content aggregators entered freelancers’ lexicon.

It was the year of the mobile app, the multimedia story, SEO tags and crowdsourcing.

It’s only fitting that as we say goodbye to 2009, and with it the first decade of the 21st century, we also bid farewell to journalism practices of yesterday and embraces those of the future as the media business leaves print behind (more or less) for an online-only world and all the changes, risks and opportunities that come with it.

With that in mind, here are my picks for the top media trends of last year, and what they mean for independent writers in 2010:

Content aggregators – They’ve been called mills, farms, and in one case even demonic. I’ll stick with the more neutral-sounding content aggregators to describe sites such as Demand Studios, Associated Content, Helium, and possibly AOL’s new Seed.com. All those sites are hiring freelancers to churn out thousands of SEO-enabled how-to pieces and other “articles” a day in hopes the information will show up high in Google search rankings thereby maximizing the proprietors’ online advertising earnings. The debate over the opportunity these sites present for freelance writers has raged on here and on other freelance blogs for the better part of the year, and media industry heavyweights have weighing in with their (mostly) negative opinions.
Takeaway for freelancers: Content aggregators are here to stay, at least for the short term – although recent changes Google’s made to its search algorithm could affect them in the long run. Also here to stay are a contingent of writers happy for the query-free gigs these sites offer, even if the rates they pay are pitifully low when calculated on a piece-by-piece basis. I remain unconvinced of the merit of doing this type of work, though understand its attraction to someone breaking into the freelance business or with limited time or desire to pitch stories.

Hyperlocal – From the everything-old-is-new-again department. Never have so many been so interested in what’s happening in your Zip Code, your voting precinct, your city block or rural postal route. They are to the news business what nanotechnology is to the tech industry. From biggies like MSNBC, AOL and Examiner.com’s billionaire owner Philip Anschutz to tiny startups, hyperlocal is everywhere. According to Knight Citizen News Network, journalists and hobbyists have started more than 800 hyperlocal sites to date. But will they last? Some are already shutting down. The cofounders of one ambitious southern California hyperlocal project – both long-time journalists – opted to shutter their site at the end of 2009 despite accolades, ads and a partnership with their area’s major metro daily. Why? They couldn’t scale the business to make it profitable without taking on more employees – and the cost that comes with them – a step they were unwilling to take.
Takeaway for freelancers: Hyperlocal remains a viable alternative to working for content aggregators. But like aggregators they don’t pay much. Treat it like the experiment it is. Include work for hyperlocal sites in a broader assignment mix so if a venture goes under you’re not stuck. Or if you go on staff, treat it like a stint at a community newspaper – which is basically what it is – and gauge how long you’re willing to stay for the experience and clips you’ll gain. If you’re interested in starting one of these on your own, you can apply for one of 9 grants of $25,000 each that American University’s J-Lab is awarding for community news sites this year. Applications are due March 1.l

Nonprofit news – This year, everybody who wasn’t busy creating a hyperlocal news site was putting together a 501c3 to start a nonprofit news venture (actually, some were one and the same). According to popular thinking, if nobody’s making money from advertising anymore, why bother, just start out as a nonprofit and hunt for financing through grants, corporate sponsorships, subscriptions and donations. So far it’s working for sites such as MinnPost, Voice of San Diego and ProPublica, which have raised hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars respectively. The bigger question: whether it’s a model that dozens, or hundreds of other ventures can successfully duplicate, similar to the country’s public radio stations. As a matter of fact, don’t rule out the country’s public radio stations as a source of nonprofit news innovation, as stations such as Oregon Public Broadcasting are busy working to expand their coverage areas and the news they dish up on their websites.
Takeaway for freelancers: Nonprofits aren’t the backwater they used to be, especially if an organization is savvy or lucky enough to get backed by Knight Digital Media or another source of major grant funding. Most of these enterprises are being started by ex-newspaper or magazine journalists – meaning if you write for them you’re more likely to get high-quality editing, always good for the clips file.

User generated content – Where to begin. User-generated content is old news if you think of it in terms of YouTube and Facebook. But it’s catching on in new ways. For example, in a different type of user-generated content, more companies are choosing to bypass newspapers and magazines and instead of advertising, starting custom publications, especially online. Expect these types of projects to flourish in 2010 (Disclaimer: I started working on one of them not long ago). Is it journalism? Yes, and no. Sponsored content is after all, sponsored content. But some sponsors understand that for their publications to be taken seriously they have to present information that’s reported and presented like the real deal. The more well-known user-generated content trend is of course the reader comments, videos, etc., that more publications are building into what they do. Expect to see newspapers, magazines and websites do even more of this in 2010.
Takeaway for freelancers: If you don’t already do work for custom publications, now’s the time to look into it. Don’t think you have to pitch publishers of custom publications for the work. If you’ve written for corporate clients in the past, why not pitch them on a news site, or even an e-newsletter. Another options: introducing yourself to one of the growing crop of digital media agencies that produce online-only custom publications. As for the other kind of user-generated content – any writer running a blog or specialized social network has to think about ways to maximize reader involvement.

Entrepreneurship - With so many journalists getting laid off, it was inevitable some would go into business for themselves. Unlike long-time solo writers – such as yours truly – these reporters and editors don’t want to identify themselves as “freelancers,” a word that for better or worse still connotes a lower status word worker in some circles. Besides, some portion of these newly unleashed writers are opting to steer their own destinies rather than wait for editors to answer their queries, so calling them entrepreneurial journalists fits. What are these EJs doing? Creating news apps for iPhones and Androids. Working on the hyperlocal and nonprofit news ventures above. Creating technology platforms or providing the training journalists or newspapers need to their jobs better in the future.
The takeaway for freelancers: There’s never been a better time to start something on your own. The tools are abundant and free or close to it.  In cities such as Portland and New York, it’s relatively easy to find coworking spaces dedicated to writers or start ups or both. There’s also a wealth of information online and

Twitter - At the start of the year Twitter was still Facebook’s little brother, a circus sideshow fun for goofing off on but not really anything you could use for business. At least that was the perception. But as the year wore on and more publications and writers opened accounts, it became apparent Twitter could be used not just to research stories but tell them too. Dan Baum drove this point home when he took to Twitter to tell his tale of being fired from The New Yorker. If that wasn’t enough, there was always coverage of the plane landing in the Hudson, the Iranian election protests and Michael Jackson’s death to convince you Twitter had arrived as a news source.
Takeaway for freelancers: If you haven’t hopped on Twitter yet, now’s the time. Don’t worry about how you’ll use it, at least not at first. Give yourself some time to play around with it and see how things work. Then come up with a plan that fits into your writing business. You read more of my advice on how writers can use Twitter on this blog post and this one.

Other trends: the wave of online-only startup publications on all matter of subjects will increase; blogging will remain big; more publications and writers will experiment with mobile apps; and writers will see publications’ freelance budgets increase, though not all will return to pre-2008 levels.

Got your own picks for the major media industry trends of the past year?