Oh, where to begin. This has been some week for writers. A freelancer outs an editor who lifted one of her old story without telling or paying her and then castigates said writer for being upset – a story that other outraged writers quickly made sure went viral. Another freelancers chronicles – rather humorously I might add – his experience writing for Demand Media in the Columbia Journalism Review. The Online News Association wraps up what could arguably be its best conference ever, with 1,200 people attending, then tops if off by announcing a digital journalism training partnership with Poynter Institute. Then there was that little matter of the mid-term elections, which got shared, tweeted, liked, mapped and Foursquared from start to finish.

Here are some highlights, plus a few other goodies I happened to come across:

The Cooks Source roasting – It’s hard to choose a recap of what went down to list here because there are so many, and they’re all variations on the twin themes of disbelief and outrage. I’m including one from CNN that tells it pretty straight. You’ll find others on Gawker, the Guardian, etc., along with plenty of comments – snarky, crude and worse – on the magazine’s Facebook page. And writer Monica Gaudio shares her version of the events on her own blog. The takeaway for editors – read up on copyright law and understand the different between “on the Internet” and “public domain.” The takeaway for writers – now you know why all those people have been telling you why should set up a Google News alert on your own byline, so you can catch plagarists in the act sooner v. later.

In Demand: A Week Inside the Future of Journalism – It’s become a popular conceit for an otherwise upstanding journalist to dabble with writing for a content farm or hyperlocal news iste to make the point of how horrible/mindless/poorly edited/underpaid/you get the picture the work is and why other writers shouldn’t bother. Since I started this blog, I can think of at least a half dozen such experiments, including this one and this one that I’ve written about on this blog. Nicholas Spangler’s experiment writing for Demand for a week is worth mentioning because it’s one of the newest, goes into a greater amount of detail about the process than a lot of the others, and landed in the pages of the esteemed Columbia Journalism Review, which gives it extra street cred.

2010 Online News Association Conference – This annual conference of media hacks and hackers*was attended by a SRO crowd and can I say how much it killed me not to be there this year? Sounds like a good time was had by all. In case you missed it, you can read about ONA innovators, an ONA magazine, and the conference’s top three design highlights from 10,000 Words. *This is not a disparaging term. In fact, Hacks and Hackers is the name of a group of digital journalists and the coders who love them that’s gotten so popular, enclaves are popping up all over the country.

My Life as an Heiress (The New Yorker) – I want to be Nora Ephron when I grow up. Since I’m not Jewish, wasn’t raised in Hollywood and my parents weren’t in the movie business, so it ain’t gonna happen. But I can still admire her work, a great example of which is in the Oct. 11 of The New Yorker. “My Life as an Heiress” is Ephron at her best: personal, self deprecating, funny, full of sidetracks that only seem to ramble but eventually fit into the larger fabric of the story. And she saves the best for last.

The best of the rest:

• How I Make $5,000 a Month as a Paid Blogger (Make a Living Writing) – The secret’s no secret, says Carol Tice, just good old fashioned hard work.
• 5 common blogging tips that aren’t true (Rob Cubbon)
• The secret weapon that makes your content successful (Copyblogger) – There goes that Carol Tice again. What’s the secret? I ain’t saying on this one, you’ll have to find out for yourself.
• Why do ebooks cost so much? (Michael Hyatt)
• Journalism tech cheat sheet (xkcd) – Just for fun.

The most well known of these blog ad networks is Google AdSense. But there are others. One of those is BlogHer, the network of blogs for women that’s now 2,500 bloggers strong.

Four-year-old BlogHer has become so successful it now competes with some of the largest women’s magazine publishers for Fortune 500 advertising dollars and will “quite likely” be profitable for the first time in 2010, according to BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone. She talked about the business and the opportunities it presents for freelancers who blog at the recent Online News Association annual conference.

If you’ve considered running ads on your blog, here are some things to know about working with BlogHer. One important thing to note: as of early November, BlogHer was not accepting applications for new bloggers. But you can put your name on a waiting list.

BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone (Photo: BlogHer)

Expect editorial guidelines. Before bloggers can join BlogHer they have to sign editorial guidelines prohibiting them running things like hate speech or allowing similar nasty comments from readers. To drive home the importance of this, contributors have to print out, sign and fax in this agreement. “I’ve learned that if you make it unsafe for (people) to say ‘I support McCain and here’s why,’ for example, you’ll never be able to grow the community the way we want to,” Stone said in her ONA address. These days, spam has overtaken hate speech as the biggest thorn in Stone’s side, including bloggers trying to embed commercial messages into their posts. “We have a very adept ‘Mark as Spam’ function,” Stone said. “We ignore spambots and go after people who are abusing our community practices agreement.”

They use editors. BlogHer has 7 to 10 headline editors on staff, each policing 200 to 300 blogs to make sure they don’t violate terms of the network’s community practices agreement.

They share ad revenue. Most individual bloggers get a cut of ad revenue. For every $1 in advertising on BlogHer, the company takes 10 percent off the top and splits the rest 50-50. Ad rates are based on CPMs, “So if they have 10,000 viewers and we have a $10/CPM, she’ll get $4.50 if she has a typical arrangement with us,” Stone said. The company doesn’t cut a check until a blog has accumulated $25 in ad revenue. BlogHer also has special arrangements with 79 contributors who are paid $50 a post, Stone said.

It’s OK to be small but it pays to be big. Traffic on some BlogHer blogs is quite small and Stone is OK with that. “We’ve always said we don’t care about quantity, we care about quality,” she said. “But some people go supernova. We have bloggers on the network who are earning five-figure incomes and are living off of that.”

‘Fish where your fish are.’ While Stone encourages bloggers to use SEO, social network and other tactics to improve site traffic, she believes building a blog following involves more than that. “The goal is to fall in love with a subject area, write expert content about it and go discuss it with other people. Fish where your fish are. If you’re blogging on health care or taking fantastic pictures of your children or pioneer women joining a network like ours is a great option” because it puts you in touch with blogs on similar topics that you can build alliances with. Building alliances with newspapers, magazines or other publications in your area is another. “Coalition building is everything in this space,” she said. “The bottom line is if you build it they will not necessarily come. It takes a village to building a blog following.”

Readers come before content. Stone, who has a journalism background, says she started out thinking content came before audience. But her BlogHer experience has taught her to think the other way around. The network started out with 34 parenting blogs, grew to 180 and mushroomed from there. Based on what readers asked for, Stone and her two co-founders eventually moved into different subjects, then added conferences, a news service, publishing network and other services – all because that’s what readers said they wanted. “We had guidelines first, then wrapped the business model around it later,” Stone said.

Changes are coming. Stone’s convinced initiatives the network undertook to cover last year’s presidential campaign and health care reform are the wave of the future. “We think women in our network care as much as the future of journalism as they do about Manolo Blahniks,” she said. “Our goal is to listen as hard as we can to where they want to go with the tools we have. We lead by listening. That’s the way we’ve been able to success so far.” Expect to see more changes in the not-too-distant future, as BlogHer moves into other forms of media, including books, radio and video, she said.