Newspapers like the Oregonian may never reach the same level of readers or advertising they once had. But that doesn’t mean the news is going away.

Around Portland and the state, hyperlocal news sites, blogs, and other fledgling news efforts are popping up to take over where traditional media outlets have left off.

That’s the message that came through from journalists – including me – who discussed about the local media scene on this morning’s installment, Rebirth of Local Journalism, on Think Outloud, Oregon Public Broadcasting’s morning public affairs show.

In case you missed it, here’s a stream of the complete, 60 minute broadcast. Yours truly comes on at about minute 37 (give or take a minute or two).

Hyperlocal news is hot.

As newspapers shrink, more people turn to the Internet for information and easy-to-use online content management tools flourish, hyperlocal news ventures are popping up everywhere.

In advance of my presentation on hyperlocal news at Digital Journalism Camp tomorrow in Portland, I’m putting together a list of resources that might be helpful if you’re contemplating writing for one of these ventures, or starting one yourself.

What is hyperlocal news? It’s coverage of current events happening in a community written and published entirely online. How you define coverage, events and community varies. Right off the bat I can think of hyperlocal news ventures that cover:

• A city or town
• Individual neighborhoods within a city or town
• A specific industry, topic or subculture within a given city or community
• A multi-state region

The “news” part of hyperlocal news also varies. Some hyperlocal ventures operate like newspapers, covering local government as a civic watchdog, as well as publishing other news, features, entertainment and sports. Other hyperlocal ventures zero in on a specific topic, like biking or books.

Some hyperlocal ventures are hybrids, like The Portland Sentinel, which will be represented on the Digital Journalism Camp panel. The Sentinel publishes news about North and NE Portland daily online and puts out a print edition once a month.

Some hyperlocal news sites are one-person operations that look, read and act more like blogs than newspapers, with stories and posts that with a strong opinion and point of view. Others adopt a more neutral tone and look more like traditional newspaper Websites.

Here are some resources for starting a hyperlocal news site:

• GrowthSpur – A just-announced venture started by journalist, entrepreneur and WashingtonPost.com co-founder Mark Potts. The start up will provide tools and services to “that will take a lot of the guesswork out of starting or running local sites and turn them into successful, sustainable businesses,” according to Potts’ July 30 announcement.
• Outside.in – Another start-up, with a tool called Outside.in for Publishers that creates “an out-of-the-box hyperlocal news section for your website.”
• EveryBlock – Hyperlocal news blog operating in 11 major cities, with four more in beta tests.
• Placeblogger – Blog platform and directory.
• Patch – Hyperlocal blog platform builder created by team of media industry veterans.

Here are some resources for keeping tabs on hyperlocal news ventures. If you know of others let me know and I’ll add them.

• Knight Citizen News Network Directory of Citizen Media Sites – Listing of 800 hyperlocal news sites in the United States, with an interactive map and downloadable Excel spreadsheet. (This is not up to date because there’s nothing listed in Oregon.)
• HyperlocalBlogger.com – Covers developments in the hyperlocal news business. Check out their series, Starting a hyperlocal blog.
• Hyperlocal news sites listing – From Hyperlocal World, British-based blog that tracks all things hyperlocal.
• WikiCity – The city wiki project hopes to create a location-based blogroll directory to will serve as a list of hyperlocal news sites.
• BlogCatalog – Lists about two dozen hyperlocal blogs.

You can follow the hyperlocal news panel discussion and other sessions at Digital Journalism Camp on this conference feed.

A while back, I urged freelance writers who were thinking of working for content sites like Helium.com or Demand Studios to take a stab at hyperlocal news instead.

Hyperlocal news is a catch-all phrase that describes websites or blogs devoted to covering a city, town or neighborhood, or a specific beat within a city or neighborhood like biking, books or tech start ups. Think of them as the 21st century equivalent of the neighborhood paper you used to pick up on the street corner, or the weekly paper your parents subscribed to so they could read about your high school sports teams.

Hyperlocal news ventures have popped up around the country, and I’ve mentioned several successful ones here before, including SealBeachDaily.com and NewzJunky.

If you’re interested in learning more about hyperlocal news, and you live within driving distance of Portland, plan now to attend a panel discussion on hyperlocal news I’m moderating at Portland’s Digital Journalism Camp on Saturday, Aug. 1.

Digital Journalism Camp PDX is a free one-day conference on the future of journalism and what it means to media practitioners. To date, close to 85 journalists, bloggers and freelance writers have signed up to attend.

Camp-style conferences - very popular right now in tech circles – are less formal than traditional conferences and normally include a mix of sessions on pre-determined topics along with sessions conference goers choose once they get there.

Organizer and Portland freelance writer Abraham Hyatt is still putting the finishing touches on the Digital Journalism Camp agenda. But the day is likely to include discussions of digital storytelling, podcasting, SEO for journalists, new media revenue models and more.

The hyperlocal news panel I’m moderating will feature proprietors of three ventures in Portland and Seattle:

• Cornelius Swart, publisher and managing editor, Portland Sentinel, a neighborhood newspaper in North Portland with a strong online component.
• Ken Aaron, co-founder, Neighborhood Notes, a news and entertainment site that covers Portland’s four quadrants.
• Justin Carder, Neighborlogs, a Seattle hyperlocal news site.

For a little preview of what we’ll be talking about, here’s Justin Carder’s analysis of how much money he thinks he’ll make this year at Neighborlogs, roughly $14,000.

Digital Journalism Camp takes place Saturday, Aug. 1, 9:30 a.m. to mid-afternoon and will be held at The Oregonian (yes, we get the irony too), 1320 SW Broadway, Portland, Oregon 97201.

Even though it’s free, space is limited, so sign up early.

I’ll be posting more information about the camp as it’s available. You can also follow camp news on Twitter at @journopdx.

L. J. Williamson was frustrated with what she felt was a lack of editorial oversight on Examiner.com, the Denver-based content aggregator.

So she gamed the system.

Williamson, a Los Angeles freelancer with clips from big name publications like the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly and Sunset magazine, wrote a series of Examiner.com pieces that she admits included exaggerations and half-truths, like this one about the dangers of playing tag. She explains the whole thing in an email she sent to Fishbowl LA, the Mediabistro blog on the Los Angeles media business.

Nothing happened. No phone calls from fact checkers. No emails from editors questioning her sources. Nothing, that is, until Williamson went a little too far and wrote an autism-related story about Jenny McCarthy the actress and alternative treatment advocate noticed and had her lawyers follow up.

In no time, Examiner pulled the stories and fired Williamson, although she argues since she hadn’t gotten a dime from the site it wasn’t really getting fired.

Williamson says she wrote the stories as an experiment to call out the shortcomings of content aggregators, Examiner.com in particular. In a comment on the Fishbowl LA story, Examiner.com’s editorial director Travis Henry says the site has a growing editorial staff that works with writers, providing them with coaching and daily training sessions.

Here at WordCount, there’s been a similar exchange of opinions on the value of writing for content aggregators recently. In a post and multiple follow up comments, a Helium representative explained the site’s editorial process and how much money writers can make. Several freelancers countered her with arguments explaining why they won’t write for content aggregators or why they did and wouldn’t again. I even chimed in with my own advice to write for a hyperlocal news site instead.

While newspapers and magazines figure out how to transform themselves into fiscally sound Internet businesses, the pay-per-click business model that content aggregators – my friend and fellow freelancer Heather Boerner calls them content aggravators -  use to compensate writerscitizen journalists isn’t going away. Whether it will become the predominant online publishing business model in the future is hard to say. But it’s safe to assume the arguments over the merits of working for content aggregators will continue.

A funny thing happened on the way to compiling this list of digital media trendsetters.

I’d put out a call to writers and editors on LinkedIn asking for names of industry folks I should include. But instead of news industry luminaries, I kept getting social media trailblazers. Wait a minute, I wanted to say, you don’t understand – social media isn’t the same as online news.

Then I started using Twitter. It didn’t take long to figure out that for the people who hang out on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other online networks the social media hotdogs and digital media trendsetters are one in the same. They’re the ones people friend, follow and read. They’re the ones broadcasting the news of a US Airways plane going down in the Hudson River and Barack Obama’s inauguration  – regardless of who they are, where they are, their day job, their background or experience.

That meant I had to rethink my definition of trendsetter.

Here’s what I came up with. It’s totally subjective and different from what I would have picked six month ago, and probably what I’d pick six months from now. When possible, I’ve linked their names to their Twitter IDs or websites.

The Old School

• Bill Keller - Executive editor of the New York Times, charged with bringing the Grey Lady into the 21st century. Appointed paper’s first social media editor earlier this week.
• Jonathan Miller – Former AOL chief recently hired by Rupert Murdoch to run News Corp.’s digital interests, including MySpace and Hulu (minus the Wall Street Journal).
• Russ Stanton – Los Angeles Times editor. Figuring out a way how to stay relevant – and solvent – in the Internet age.
• Dean Singleton – Head of MediaNews Group, which owns the Denver Post and 99 other media properties, and leader of the charge to help newspapers monetize the Web.

The New Wave

• Tina Brown – Proprietress of The Daily Beast, a cross between the Conde Nast glossies she used to edit and a daily politics and gossip column.
• Arianna Huffington – HuffPost founder; gadfly turned new media publisher.
• Hyperlocal news bloggers – NeighborsGo, NewzJunky, SealBeachDaily.com, WestSeattleBlog, Neighborhood Notes, the list goes on and on
• Josh Marshall – Creator of Talking Points Memo, political blog that won a George Polk Award in 2008 for reporting on the firings of US attorneys.
• Paul Steiger – Former WSJ managing editor and current editor in chief at ProPublica, another high-profile online-only news outfit doing original investigative journalism on a non-profit basis.

The Professors

• Jeff Jarvis – J-school prof at City University of New York, Buzz Machine blogger, author of What Would Google Do? and former magazine and newspaper reporter, columnist and editor.
• Jay Rosen – NYU journalism prof, PressThink blogger and director of NewAssignment.Net, “an experiment in open-source reporting.”
• Sree Sreenivasan – Tech evangelist and professor at Columbia Journalism School, know for his extensive new media workshops.

The Promoters

• Seth Godin – Author, viral marketer extraordinaire, quipster.
• Guy Kawasaki – Entrepreneur, author, social media guru, proprietor of AllTop “online magazine rack” and blogger at How to Change the World. On Twitter at @guykawasaki.
• Peter Shankman – PR guy and founder of Help a Reporter Out crowdsourcing service for reporters.

The Pundits

• Paul Gillin – Social media expert, author and chronicler of newspaper hard times at Newspaper Deathwatch.
• Mark Glaser – Columnist for PBS MediaShift, “Your guide to the digital media revolution.”
• Alan Mutter – Newsman turned venture capitalist and blogger at Reflections of a Newsosaur.
• Jeremiah Owyang – Forrester Research social media analyst.

The Tech Geeks

• Chris Brogan – Mr. Social Media. Read and learn.
• Matt Mullenweg – Founding developer of WordPress blogging software, used by newspapers such as the New York Times, and head of WordPress’ parent company, Automattic.
• Dipchand “Deep” Nishar – Former Google exec who became LinkedIn’s v.p. of products in early December and has since rolled out a bevy of service upgrades.
• Darren Rowse – The Aussie blogging mastermind behind ProBlogger.
• Robert Scoble – Uber tech geek. Former Microsoft tech evangelist and Fast Company videographer blogging at Scobleizer.com.
• Biz Stone and Evan Williams – Co-founder and CEO of Twitter respectively. Reportedly turned down a $500 million buy out offer from Facebook earlier this year.

Know other new media pioneers I should include? Leave a comment. If I get enough I’ll re-post an expanded list.

If you’re getting into freelancing these days, one option is writing for content aggregator sites like Helium, About.com, Associated Content or HubPages. These companies pay writers to create massive amounts of content to help the sites rise up to the top of Web searches and make more money on click throughs.

But for freelancers, there’s a huge debate happening over the merits of writing for a content aggregator to advance your career, a debate that last week spilled onto the pages of this blog. First long-time freelancer Tim Beyers examined the reasons why a writer shouldn’t bother with content aggregators. Then Helium’s new writer outreach manager Barbara Whitlock countered with her own detailed explanation of  why freelancers would want to write for a content aggregator, Helium in particular.

I say if you’re a writer looking for experience, there’s a better way.

Instead of writing for an aggregator, find out what hyperlocal news sites have popped up in your area, introduce yourself and ask if there’s anything you can do to help.

In case you’re not familiar with them, hyperlocal news sites are blogs that focus on what’s happening in a specific area, be it a neighborhood, town or city. You might also know them as community news blogs or citizen journalist sites. Some examples: NewzJunky in Watertown, New York; Hop Town in Hopkinsville, Massachusetts, and NeighborsGo.com in Dallas.

If you work for a hyperlocal news organization you’ll probably start out making about as much as you would at a content aggregator – which is to say not much. But if you really are just starting out, you could use the opportunity to go out and do some man-on-the-street reporting,  and pick up other valuable experience.

If you don’t think there are hyperlocal or citizen journalists operating in your city you’re wrong, you just haven’t looked hard enough. Here in Portland, there are at least four, including Neighborhood Notes and OurPDX, more if you count sites that focus on niches like tech, books or cycling.

If there really aren’t hyperlocal sites where you live, start one. By teaching yourself everything you need to know to run a hyperlocal or community news site, you’re teaching yourself everything you need to know in 2009 and going into the future to get hired as a staff writer or make it as a freelancer, things like using a content management system (a fancy term for blogging or blog-like software), HTML, linking, how to write for a blog, how to write straight news, how to take pictures, video and audio, etc.

When it comes down to it, as long as you’re going to the time and trouble of learning the craft, why give the fruits of your labors to another business when you could maximize the benefit and profit for the enterprise that matters most – you.

If you think reporters, editors, newspaper pundits, Sam Zell and the Sulzberger family are the only ones worried about the fate of the media business, you haven’t spent a Saturday morning with a room full of geeks.

At last weekend’s BarCampPortland III meetup, the assembled developers, programmers and Web 2.0 entrepreneurs were just as concerned about the fate of the news business as the smattering of old-school journalists who dragged themselves out of bed for the bad coffee and good conversation.

The techies wanted to know all kinds of things: Why are newspaper headlines misleading? Will micropayments – the vending machine model for paying for news stories – work? Should bloggers hold themselves to the same ethical constraints as reporters? Just what are those ethical constraints? Should bloggers be reporters? Should reporters be bloggers? Is hyperlocal news making money? And just how hyper is your local?

All excellent questions. The free-flowing discussion that followed touched on a lot of them without providing a lot of answers, at least not any definitive ones. But it was a start.

If the number of tech-slash-news geeks at BarCamp was any indication, Portland is a hive of activity on the hyperlocal news front. No less than three online community news ventures were represented: Neighborhood Notes; OurPDX.com and The Portland Sentinel, a monthly paper in North Portland with a daily news website. In case you hadn’t heard, PDX TV station KATU is looking to hire a Web producer to write, curate and publish local stories on KATU.com.

BarCamp took place the day after The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., filed for bankruptcy protection, making talk of the future of the news all the more pressing. The Columbian sent a trio of newsroom staffers to BarCamp, including John Hill, the journalist turned journalism IT guy who wrote the ‘how hyper is your local’ blog post I linked to higher in this piece.

Guys like Hill, and Michelle Nicolosi, the executive producer at the newly only-only SeattlePI.com, and Kate Cohen and Donna Wares, co-bloggers at the SealBeachDaily community news site in California could be the salvation of the news business. They and a new breed of hybrid tech-news entrepreneur, like Steve Walling, a Portland writer and consultant who’s involved with projects like AboutUs.org and WikiProjectOregon.

Here in Portland, the conversation that started at BarCamp is continuing. As I write this, Abraham Hyatt, another Portland journalist who’s tracking the online news business, is planning a digital news meetup for sometime in August. Stay tuned for details. And tell a techie friend.

This week’s highlights from the world of freelance writing and online media:

Online news wins big – Much was made of the fact that although this was the first year Pulitzer Prizes were open to online-only publications none received any of the newspaper industry’s highest honors and only one, Politico, was a finalist, and in the editorial cartooning category at that. But that’s a bit of a short sided view. Although no online-only outfits took home awards, online news was recognized in several categories, most notably the St. Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact Website, which tested the validity of political statements made during the 2008 elections and took home the Pulitzer for national reporting. Read the entire list of 2009 winners here.

More bloggers than bartenders – Speaking of new forms of news, the Wall Street Journal says there are more people in the United States making money blogging than tending bar. According to the story, 1.7 million Americans are paid bloggers and 452,000 make it their primary source of income. According to the story, it takes 100,000 unique visitors a month to make $75,000 a year.

Hyperlocal news ventures get grants – And speaking of getting paid to blog, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University’s School of Communication will grant up to $25,000 each in start up funds over the next two years to eight hyperlocal community news projects. Winners of the New Voices grants were chosen from among 304 applicants. They include Oakland Local, a daily news Website and mobile service covering Oakland, California; and The Villager, a hyperlocal news site covering Coconut Grove West in Florida crerated by Kim Grinfelder, a University of Miami professor.

Using social media to build the Brand of You – Robin Broitman, an Internet and social media strategist and Web publisher for the National Wildlife Federation, has published the most extensive listing I’ve ever seen on using social media to build brand identity. What does this have to do with freelancing? Plenty. In a world where more writers are disconnecting from staff jobs, by choice or otherwise, having an identifiable brand is one way to stand out in the crowd. Broitman’s list is compiled from blog posts written by some of social media’s biggest gurus and covers everything from how to write more effective online network profile pages to why you should use your real name as your Twitter handle.

Freelance love – The folks at ODesk.com, a market for online teams, put together a list of 100 top freelance blogs that includes blogs on freelance writing, Web design, graphic design, software development, illustration and more. OK, so WordCount didn’t make the cut – there’s always next time.

This week’s Twitter tools:

• @APStylebook – The international wire service has created a home on Twitter for its venerable style guide for news reporters. Staffers manning the account will can’t answer AP style questions but will direct Twitterers to the service’s Website, APStylebook.com.
• TwitterSheep – A fun app that creates a Wordle-like word cloud based on your Twitter followers. Here’s mine.