You may be too late to order a box lunch. But you aren’t too late to show up for the all-day discussion of what it would take to create a new, non-profit news organization covering Portland and Oregon. Tickets are $25.

If you attend, you’ll be among 100+ practicing journalists, community activists and plain old citizens expected to be there. I’ll be one of them.

Portland is one of dozens of cities where hyperlocal news sites have started or are being started as newspapers and TV news lose readers and ad revenue. Just this week, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar announced plans to launch a local news service in Hawaii in early 2010. In recent weeks and months similar enterprises have been launched in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere.

If you can’t make it, you can still read the working papers the group published in advance of the conference to set out its thoughts and hopes for what a Portland nonprofit news site could be.

You can also follow the conference on Twitter at @wemakethemedia or #wemakethemedia.

When it comes to the newspaper industry, everybody’s a nonprofit. even if they never intended to be – because everybody’s losing money.

In the wake of the disastrous effect the economy has had on the newspaper business and public’s changing appetite for how they consume news, more groups are popping up around the country to offer news on a nonprofit basis.

One of the most well-known to date is the VoiceofSanDiego.org, started four years ago and today 11 journalists strong. Minneapolis-based MinnPost is another. There’s also ProPublica, the investigative outfit headed by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger. Ann Imse, a former OC Register colleague of mine who was a casualty of the Rocky Mountain News’ closing earlier this year, is working on putting together a nonprofit news venture in Denver. The staff at VoiceofSanDiego says they field calls from journalists wanting to know how to put a nonprofit newsroom together on an almost weekly basis.

That brings us to Portland, where thriving tech, creative and media communities have already spawned lots of local online and hyperlocal news publications, as well as a budding digital journalism community.

Now it looks like the Rose City could be the next metropolis to host a nonprofit news experiment. A group of media veterans have combined forces on a master plan to establish a nonprofit investigative news agency that would cover the greater metro area. The group, which registered the domain name WeMaketheNews.com and put up a website at that address this week, hopes to kick off its efforts with a day-long conference on Saturday, Nov. 21, at the University of Oregon’s Turnbull Center in the Old Town neighborhood in downtown Portland. The event’s being backed by Oregon Public Broadcasting and The City Club of Portland.

Among the minds behind the venture: Ron Buell, the founding editor and publisher of Willamette Week; Oregonian arts columnist Barry Johnson; Digital Journalism Portland conference organizer Abraham Hyatt; OPB news vice president Morgan Holm, and others.

Full disclosure: I’ve met with Buell, and agreed to participate as a panelist at the conference (I guess as a female independent writer who gets the tech stuff and recently attended the Online News Association’s annual confab, I’m a lot of interest groups rolled into one). That’s the extent of my involvement so far.

Does Portland need another news agency to compete against, or work with established organizations including the Oregonian, OPB, Oregon Business, Portland Monthly, the Portland Business Journal and Daily Journal of Commerce, Pamplin’s Portland Tribune and its various suburban weeklies, Portland Mercury, the Portland Sentinel and other print and online papers and blogs that cover the area’s neighborhoods and interest groups? I don’t know. But I’m willing to listen.

The WeMaketheNews.com conference is limited to 200. Tickets are $25. Sign up here.