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.

***

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.”

For once, there was good news mixed in with the bad. For media companies, 2010 marked the beginning of a modest recovery after two years of falling ad revenue, layoffs and a wholesale revamping of business models. The industry’s never going back to what it was, and that’s not an altogether bad thing. But after non-stop doom and gloom in 2008 and 2009, this year was downright cheery. Staffs may have been lean but layoffs stopped, and some companies started hiring again. Freelancers covering beats such as business, technology and the environment reported getting more work. And everybody was abuzz over digital and mobile initiatives.

This year saw big Internet companies jump into hyperlocal news, several high profile nonprofit news ventures take off and Demand Media, the controversial operator of SEO-based Internet content sites, take the first steps toward selling its shares to the public, though that now appears to be stalled as the company deals with questions about its accounting.

For the first time, companies spent more advertising online than they did in print. Tribune Co., parent to the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune among others, withstood an internal scandal and ensuing management shakeup but appears to be close to climbing out of bankruptcy, finally. Tina Brown’s Daily Beast bought Newsweek, chasing Arianna Huffington‘s HuffPo for online world domination. The New York Times continued to lead digital newsroom innovators, but local dailies and online-only publications are catching up.

It was a year in which the news was dominated the economy, unemployment, health-care reform, the Census, Afghanistan, Haiti, North Korea, mid-term elections, and most recently, secret U.S. government documents made public by WikiLeaks – all of which you could read about on Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Droid, BlackBerry, iPad or the portable electronic device of your choice.

Here’s my list of 10 top media industry trends of 2010.

1. Hyperlocal news goes big time – If 2009 was the year anybody could start a hyperlocal news site, 2010 was the year the big guys entered the picture. Nowhere was this more apparent than Patch, AOL’s ambitious hyperlocal experiment, for which the Internet giant said it would hire a total of 500 writer/editors by the end of 2010. Yahoo responded by acquiring Associated Content, and Examiner.com’s billionaire owner Philip Anschutz struck a deal to provide local content for Thomson Reuters’ new general news (wire) service. Meanwhile, independent hyperlocal operations in cities such as Seattle and San Diego continued to grow and collect accolades for their work.

2. Nonprofit news sites come into their own – Back in 2008 when the economy tanked and the public decided they’d rather get their news from Jon Stewart or the Internet, pessimists predicted the demise of for-profit news organizations and welcomed nonprofits to take their place. Two years later, some of those nonprofits are hitting their stride. Among the most notable was ProPublica, which continues to collect awards for its wide-ranging investigative work, including a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at a New Orleans medical center. Another bright spot was the Bay Citizen, the well-funded online-only nonprofit news site covering the San Francisco metro area, which launched in May. In other areas, public broadcasters such as Oregon Public Broadcasting poured money into digital initiatives to stretch their editorial efforts from the air to online.

3. Critics of content mills pile on – Critics have been dumping on Demand Media since August when the Santa Monica, California, company announced it intended to go public, with some going as far as calling the company “demon like.” That was before a Dec. 23 report on the All Things D tech blog that federal regulators were looking into the company’s accounting practices, specifically how it expenses costs for paying writers. Demand wasn’t the only so-called content farm to stir up debate. Here on WordCount, I took Suite101 to task after reading a post on the site that linked to something I’d written. Similar criticisms have been logged against other content mills such as Associated Content, Examiner.com and Helium.com.

4. Custom publishing goes digital – When advertisers pulled out of magazines and newspapers they found creative ways to spend their marketing dollars on original editorial content, spurring enormous growth in the twin businesses of content marketing and custom publishing. Some created more of those single-sponsor magazines like the kind you see in doctor’s offices. Others  - including companies such as Microsoft, Dell and American Express to name a few – created mini-websites staffed by veteran editors and reporters (like me). At the same time, companies such as Groupon and Angie’s List created in-house editorial departments or hired freelance writers to add content to what had previously been bare-bones directories or coupon  promotions. After Groupon hit the big time with its daily deals, everybody started an e-newsletter – and luckily for writers – wanted copy to put in it.

5. Hacks embrace their inner hackers – With so much of the news business moving online, a journalist who can write code (or understand it enough to work with programmers) is a journalist with a job, whether it’s on staff or freelance. The trend has seen a proliferation of formal and informal groups helping reporters get up to speed on the latest innovations in digital storytelling.  One of the biggest is the Online Journalism Association annual conference, which this fall sold out for the second year in a row. The move from print to bits and bytes has also seen the growth of Hacks and Hackers chapters in cities such as San Francisco, New York, Austin and San Diego, as well as groups in other cities, including Digital Journalism Portland and the ONA’s growing list of local meetups. Journalists who can’t get to face-to-face meetings can sign up for online training from sources such as ProPublica’s Nerd Blog, News University and Amy Webb’s KnowledgeWebb.

6. There’s a news app for that - The list of print and online publishers introducing specialized versions of their publications optimized for smartphones  or tablet computers such as the iPad became too long to track. Publishers who didn’t have a mobile app by the end of the year were working feverishly to make something available in early 2011. The New Yorker introduced its iPad app with its Oct. 4 issue, sporting a cover illustration that painter David Hockney created on – what else – his iPad. News industry sages are predicting we’ll see tablet-only, mobile first news products in 2011.

7. Collaboration is the new name of the game – In a bygone era, it would have been inconceivable for a national newspaper to contract with startup news teams to act as virtual bureaus, for one competitor to print another’s paper (without being part of a formal joint-operating agreement), or for the editor of a major daily to publish an open letter soliciting help from bloggers, freelancers and citizen journalists. That was then. Today collaboration is the name of the game and it’s taking many forms. The New York Times struck deals with news startups in San Francisco and Chicago to provide coverage in those cities. The Los Angeles Times started printing the Orange County Register. Editors such as the Oregonian’s Peter Bhatia solicited hyperlocal bloggers for help covering the paper’s circulation area. In other examples of the forms collaboration has taken, Thomson Reuters teamed up with a half-dozen partners providing sports, entertainment and local news to launch a news service to take on Associated Press and CNN, and Entrepreneur Media struck content sharing agreements with Tribune Inc., Tonic, MSNBC and HealthDay (Note: I write for SecondAct.com, which is owned by Entrepreneur.)

8. Journalists work the real-time web. The real-time Web became the journalist’s friend. Reporters use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks not just to promote their work, but to research and publish it. Reporters and freelancers crowdsource examples for stories they’re researching; track sources, companies and organizations on their beat (LinkedIn’s Companies feature and Facebook pages are good for this); keep up to date with what’s happening on their beat, in the news, and in the world (Twitter’s Lists feature is great for this) and report live from conferences, meetings and other events (Twitter).

9. Mergers, acquisitions, startups and expansions – It was a good year for companies that made it through the recession with enough money to spend on acquisitions, startups or expansions. A little $$$ went a long way and there was no lack of experienced journalists interested in full-time employment. In addition to acquiring Associated Content, in 2010 Yahoo also bought Koprol and Citizen Sports. AOL acquired TechCrunch, and as I mentioned above, IAC-backed The Daily Beast acquired Newsweek. Other companies used their resources to launch startups (remember those), including Entrepreneur (SecondAct.com is one of them), or expand operations, including TBD and Politico. Expect more of the same in 2011.

10. Tech innovators introduce The Daily Me – Talk about niche publishing. Tech innovators introduced apps that readers can use to create personalized “newspapers” based their specific interests or who they follow on Twitter or other social networks – for examples of how this looks read this or this. Some of the most popular: Paper.li, which organizes links shared on Twitter or Facebook into easy-to-read newspaper-style columns; Instapaper, which lets readers bookmark interesting articles or other tidbits they find online to read later on their computer, smartphone, iPad or as print outs; and Flipboard, for the iPad, which organize Google Reader folders, Flickr photo streams, online versions of newspapers and magazines, access social networks.

Did I miss anything? Feel free to add media industry trends you observed during 2010 or  point to other year-end media industry recaps you’ve found by leaving a comment. I’ll share the information in a follow-up post.

The online-time Internet service provider turned online content contender, is bulking up to take its Patch hyperlocal news operation nationwide.

After two-plus years of stories about media company layoffs and the end of the journalism business as we know it, isn’t news of one comany’s hiring spree uplifting?

Yes, and no.

This week AOL announced that it’s got Patch bureaus up and running in 100 neighborhoods, each one staffed by a full-time reporter/editor, helped in part by contributions from local freelancers. AOL also says it anticipates hiring another 400 Patch journos in coming weeks to expand to a total of 500 locations in 20 states by the end of 2010.

Depending on which news account you read, Patch editors make $37,000 to $40,000 a year, not bad for what is the equivalent of a editorial job at a community newspaper.

Or is it?

According to accounts that are starting to trickle into the blogosphere from journos who’ve worked at Patch, the hours are long and the pressure to produce grueling, making the pay not so great after all. And that’s the bad news.

One writer, Ed Pilolla, is this week writing a series of posts about his Patch experience, starting with why he took the job, his take on the pay and how many stories he was expected to produce a day. Pilolla, who apparently doesn’t work for Patch any more (and coincidentally took part in this year’s WordCount Blogathon), says he routinely put in 75 hours a week, which meant that his annual salary worked out to be something like $10 an hour.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is set on dominating the hyperlocal news niche, according to this Bloomberg Businessweek article, hoping to grab local advertising dollars away from home-town papers, geographically-focused content farms such as Examiner.com and mom-and-pop hyperlocal sites.

According to the Bloomberg Businessweek story, AOL is pouring $50 million into the venture. Fifty million dollars sounds like a lot of money, especially if it’s meant to cover more than a year – and most media startups don’t break even in the first year, or even the second. That amount breaks down to $100,000 per location, so if it is meant to cover two years, that’s $74,000 to $80,000 to cover the editor’s salary with the remainder going to pay freelance writers and photographers.

But AOL has also hired an EIC, four editorial directors and 52 regional editors, so that $50 million is even more thinly stretched.

According to an Aug. 17 AdAge story, Patch is paying freelancers an average of $50 a story. That’s more than what content farms like Demand Media or Associated Content pay, according to AdAge’s Edmund Lee. But, unlike those companies, “the amount of available work is limited,” he writes. “Most of Patch’s editors have a weekly freelance budget slightly north of $500, according to people familiar with the matter. Patch further differs from other content purveyors by only taking on writers with a background in journalism.”

So if you’re looking for work, either full time or freelance, is Patch worth considering?

Yes and no.

If you’ve just graduated from j-school, have been out of work or are looking for an opportunity to become a better editor and reporter or how to run a hyperlocal site, a Patch assignment might be just what you’re looking for. You’ll work with experienced editors – which is always a good thing – and for a company that’s far from a startup.

But, as Pilolla points out, 65+ hour work weeks can be exciting at first but quickly become a grind. And working so many hours leaves little time for moonlighting to make up for the crummy pay.

What do you think – would you work for Patch?

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.

In light of this week’s announcement that Yahoo is buying Associated Content, today’s Best of WordCount edition is a collection of posts I’ve done over the past year on content aggregators and hyperlocal news ventures:

On content aggregators:

• What Yahoo’s deal for Associated Content means for writers
• Suite101 CEO Peter Berger and a question of quality
• The great rate debate continues
• The race to the bottom
• WordCount Q&A: Helium CEO Mark Ranalli
• Writer games Examiner.com to make point about writing for content aggregators
• Counterpoint: Yes, freelancers should write for Helium
• Freelancers, don’t write for content aggregators

On hyperlocal news:

• AOL’s news initiative – freelance friend or foe?
• A guide to hyperlocal news
• Novice freelancers, instead of Helium, try hyperlocal

What does the deal mean for the lowly writers producing all that content Yahoo found so attractive? We’ll get to that. First some background.

With AOL investing in Seed and Patch, Demand Studios reportedly contemplating an initial public stock offering and Google and Facebook aiming for world news domination, the acquisition is Yahoo’s attempt to put a stake in the ground in the local news and content aggregator business.

Yahoo’s has been on a hiring spree lately, snapping up experienced newspaper editors and reporters to build up its news division. Last November, Yahoo hired Dallas Morning News new media strategy chief Anthony Moor to head its local news effort, which should have been a sign the company had bigger plans in store.

Yahoo’s stepping into territory that’s seen a flurry of activity from national networks like Seed and Patch and Examiner.com to smaller, home-grown hyperlocal news ventures.

According to a Yahoo press release on the deal, Yahoo will use Associated Content material for the kind of local news its in-house staff doesn’t produce. And according to an Associated Press report on the deal, once the acquisition’s done, the Associated Content website will go away and Yahoo will fold content produced by the aggregator’s freelance contributors into its own news offering.

That’s putting a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of Associated Content contributors, which the company says numbers 380,000. Sidetrack: 380,000 contributors, really? That’s the number both companies quoted in their press releases. But I can’t help but think that’s the total number of people who’ve ever written for the site; it’d be interesting to find out how many of those write for the site on a regular basis; I’d wager it’s a much smaller number.

In the immediate wake of the announcement, freelance writers weren’t sure what to make of the news.

No doubt web content writers who work for Associated Content are pleased. In an FAQ on the deal Associated Content put on its site immediate after the announcement, the company said writers would be able to contribute to a number of Yahoo-run media properties. Curiously, when I went to double check the the FAQ today the wording of that part of the release had been changed to be sightly vaguer, saying only: “With Yahoo!’s wind beneath Associated Content’s wings, contributors can expect new assignments, new ways to profit form their content and improved marketing tools.” One thing’s clear, come Q3 when the deal’s expected to close, contributors’ paychecks will be coming from a much bigger bank account.

Immediately after the deal was announced, writers turned to Twitter and private message boards to express their sentiments. “I hope this results in something better rather than something worse,” one posted on a freelance message board.

Others were more skeptical. “Unless they plan to pay a living wage, I think the (Associated Content) purchase is a bad step,” said New York writer Devon Ellington.

What my take on the deal? A couple thoughts:

• If Associated Content is hooking up with Yahoo it could be a sign the company needed deeper pockets than what were available to it as a stand-alone entity to continue building out its business plan.
• The deal’s about advertising pure and simple. Local content gives Yahoo access to local advertising that would otherwise go to those hyperlocal news ventures that have been cropping up everywhere.
• If Associated Content was attractive enough for Yahoo to spend $100 million on, you can be sure other content sites are taking notice. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Helium or HubSpot shopping for their own sugar daddies in the not too distant future.
• Acquistions make people rich. Unfortunately it’s never writers. Lawyers, advisors, matchmakers, venture capital investors – they’ll all get handsome cuts of this deal. If they’re lucky, Associated Contents writers may end up getting a few dollars more per article due to the big bump in traffic that will happen when their work starts showing up on a combined Yahoo-AC site, which the companies say will average 600 million unique visitors a month.

What about you – what’s your take on Yahoo’s deal to buy Associated Content? Do you write for either one? If you do, are you expecting significant changes?

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).

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.

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.

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.