I live and work in Portland, Oregon, and this weekend’s Best of WordCount is dedicated to the area’s burgeoning media community:

• 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.

The week’s highlights from the digital media business:

Imprisioned U.S. freelancer ends hunger strike – Roxana Saberi, the freelance broadcast convicted of spying in Iran ended a two-week hunger strike after Iranian authorities agreed to hold an appeal hearing for her next week. The Iranian-American freelance broadcast reporter was arrested in January and convicted of spying in a closed-door trial in April. Saberi’s supporters have created a website, Free Roxana Saberi.

Congress holds U.S. newspaper industry hearings – Plenty of big names held forth on the future of the news business at a May 6 Congresssional hearing. As could be expected, presenters’ POVs varied. HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington was the optimist, declaring, “Despite all the current hand wringing about the dire state of the newspaper industry – well-warranted hand wringing, I might add – we are actually in the midst of a Golden Age for news consumers.” Ex-newspaperman turned Hollywood writer (“The Wire”) David Simon was much more downbeat, saying “High-end journalism is dying in America and unless a new economic model is achieved it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else.” Replay the entire Webcast here.

Is this what they had in mind? – The Chicago Tribune is working on a new Website called Chicago Now that could be a blueprint for the 21st century news ventures discussed at this week’s Congressional hearings. According to news reports, Chicago Now will combine elements of traditional news coverage with e-commerce, blogs, advertorials and social media. The new site is distinct from RedEye, the Tribune’s free daily paper for “young, urban professionals.” The Tribune and other Tribune publishing holdings filed for federal bankruptcy protection last December.

Other stories, items and websites of interest -

• 2009 Online News Association Awards categories – 14 categories, including four paying a total of $28,000 in cash prizes. Deadline for entries is June 30, 2009.
• The Center for Investigative Journalism is hiring reporters to staff a California investigative reporting initiative funded by $2.4 million in grants.
• The Boston Globe, Las Vegas Sun, ESPN.com and CNN.com each won two 2009 Editor & Publisher EPpy awards for outstanding news industry websites and blogs. See the full list here.
• Neighborlogs – a free service/website template for creating hyperlocal community news sites.
• 17 statistics for monitoring your blog – From ProBlogger.

Twitter tools -

• Tweetmeme – Like a Digg for Twitter, this service finds the hottest stories on the service based on the number of retweets.
• How to integrate Twitter into WordPress – A Web Designer Magazine tutorial that explains in 16 very code-y steps how to weave Twitter into a WordPress.com blog.
• Twitter Secrets – An entire blog dedicated to Twitter apps and tools.

Got Websites, news or tips about the digital media business to share? Send them to me: michellerafter (at) comcast (dot) net.

If newspapers as we know them go away, who or what will act as democracy’s watchdog?

That’s the question of the day as the newspaper industry transforms itself, and the subject of a panel discussion this Friday, April 17, at the Portland City Club, a non-profit public affairs and research organization.

Panelists taking part in the debate include Peter Bhatia, executive editor of the Oregonian; Alan Stavitksy, associate dean at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism; and Charity Fain, the City Club’s executive director.

The lunch program started at 11:30 a.m. at the Governor Hotel, 611 SW 11th in downtown Portland. Cost is $16 for members and $20 for nonmembers. More information or online registration is available here.

Tuesday was the last day the Seattle Post Intelligencer published a print newspaper.

Starting today, the 146-year-old Seattle daily goes online only.

The print edition of the paper folded after Hearst Corp. determined the company couldn’t afford to continue running the money-losing paper as is.

So they pulled the plug. Rather, they plugged in. Hearst officials said they plan to reinvent the paper as a community platform with reporting from a slimmed down team of 20 reporters, smattering of columnists, reader bloggers and features on health, wellness and homes from magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Country Living, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful.

In an age of multimedia news, it’s fitting that the head of the company’s Web efforts uses the title “executive producer” rather than “editor,” a term that’s still associated with old (print) media.

That executive producer is Michelle Nicolosi, my one-time colleague at the Orange County Register and the subject of a Q&A I did last year chronicling her transformation from print reporter to multimedia maven.

It’s interesting to note that even a year ago, Nicolosi had high hopes for online journalism. She said:

In the very near future, we will all be online journalists in some way or another. The outlook for online journalists — those that play well, learn about and care about the online publication as much as we all cared about the paper 15 years ago — is much, much better than it is for people who are dragging their feet, refusing to change the way they work to accommodate the new needs of the online product.

You can read more of Nicolosi’s observations on new media on her blog, Print to Online, although one has to wonder where she’s going to find the time to update it now.

In a blog post to readers about the PI’s transformation, Nicolosi says the online-only SeattlePI.com will “break a lot of rules that newspaper Web sites stick to, and we are looking everywhere for efficiencies. We don’t feel like we have to cover everything ourselves.”

Can a newspaper successfully reinvent itself online? Nicolosi thinks so. At a time when metropolitan dailies have become the equivalent of an endangered species, you can believe editors in newsrooms across the country will be keeping tabs, and praying she’s right.

Where are newspapers headed? It’s hard to say given the varying tone of reporting on the newspaper industry and fate of newspaper reporters. On one hand, Journalism.org’s The Changing Newsroom study describes today’s newspapers as being run by smaller, younger, more tech-savvy staff. But Mark Glaser, writing in his MediaShift column at PBS.org, says papers need to do a better job innovating or they’ll lose those young, new media-savvy writers. Meanwhile, writers are still trying to figure out where Twitter fits in as a form of reporting and writing. Read on:

Out with the old, in with the new – Newspapers across the country have slashed jobs to deal with shrinking revenue, and many cited the departure of long-time journalists as their single greatest loss, according to The Changing Newsroom, a study of U.S. daily newspapers conducted by journalist Tyler Marshall and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Read all of the findings here.

Young reporters leaving newspapers - At a time when newspapers have every reason to innovate, some of their most progressive thinkers – young journalists – are leaving. Why? Frustration with the slow pace of change and papers’ often-stifling top-down newsroom management style. Read more on the phenomena from MediaShift’s Mark Glaser here.

Twitter no threat to traditional reporting – John Dickerson, chief political correspondent for Slate, postulates in this article in Harvard University’s Nieman Reports that while Twitter isn’t the next great thing in journalism, it’s not the end of reporting as we know it either. The microblogging service has its uses, Dickerson says:

Twitter is the perfect place for all of those asides I’ve scribbled in the hundreds of notebooks I have in my garage from the campaigns and stories I’ve covered over the years. Inside each of those notebooks are little pieces of color I’ve picked up along the way. Sometimes these snippets are too off-topic or too inconsequential to work into a story. Sometimes they are the little notions or sideways thoughts that become the lede of a piece or the kicker. All of them now have found a home on Twitter.