I’m starting what I hope will become a WordCount Friday feature, a recap of news and commentary on freelancing and the media business as reported by other blogs and news outlets this week. Happy reading:

The case for independent news sites as profit-makers – David Westphal, a senior fellow at USC’s Annenberg’s Center on Communication Leadership, writes on the Knight Digital Media Center’s resurrected Online Journalism Review, that independent, for-profit news Websites like NewWest.net, might be onto something.

Team writing blogs – With traditional print markets drying up, freelance writers are also thinking about new ways to sell their “products,” including LinkedIn member David Hawkins, who proposes creating a team writing blog that individuals could contribute to but eventually the group could market as packaged content to Websites or other clients. Watch out Reuters.

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program – Speaking of traditional print markets drying up, with so many reporters losing their staff jobs, blogging software maker Six Apart saw an opportunity to do a little good and a lot of self promotion and started offering recently laid off reporters a free blog package normally worth $150/year.

A bailout plan for U.S. newspapers – Hey, Uncle Sam is giving money to everybody else, why not newspapers too?

PC Magazine goes online only – January will be the last dead-tree issue of Ziff Davis’ venerable computer magazine – and can we say, for a publication that writes about all things digital, what took you so long? PC Mag joins US News & World Report and the Christian Science Monitor, which have both announced plans to go online only in 2009.

College media has come a long way – I was the editor of my college newspaper and I can tell you, way back when, we were happy with the outdated typography equipment and darkroom gear we could scrap together. That’s not the case with today’s college papers, which according to Brian Mulrey in this PBS MediaShift story, are leading the charge in innovative interactive storytelling.

What’s your least favorite part of being a freelance writer? – Even if you love working for yourself, there’s bound to be one or two things about it you don’t care for or aren’t good at. For Jennifer Mattern, author of the All Freelance Writing blog, it’s bookkeeping. What’s your least favorite part of freelancing?

To start the week, here’s a round up of recent stories about happenings in the online news business:

CJR on NY Times’ online holdings – The cover story of the July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger at the Barricades: Can Arthur Sulzberger Jr. transform The New York Times for the digital age? reveals the paper’s digital business is gaining traction despite continuing financial woes on the print side. According to author Douglas McCollam, the Times’ digital-only properties, including About.com, the search service the paper purchased in 2005, still account for only 3 percent of its annual revenue. However, revenue from all digital media operations grew 10 percent in 2007, to $330 million, topping an 8 percent jump the previous year, according to McCollam. Still, McCollam asks:

“When will gains online realistically make up for losses on the print side? “We don’t know when digital revenues will offset the decline in print,” (Publisher Arthur) Sulzberger wrote in an email, adding that “this is a question we often ask ourselves.”

Ironically, the article isn’t available on CJR’s Website yet, so if you’re not a subscriber you’ll have to find a copy or wait until it appears online. 7/16 UPDATE: The story is now online, and I added the link above.

Glaser on the demise of OJR – As I previously discussed on these pages, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications recently shut down the Online Journalism Review, which had been charting the course of online news for more than a decade. This week, Mark Glaser used his MediaShift column at PBS to “dig deeper” into the story, revealing that with a new dean and director of the journalism program, the school is in transition and rethinking where OJR fits in. Glaser raises a couple excellent points: can a school without faculty devoted to teaching online news support a Website devoted to the subject, and when all news is moving online, is the idea of an academic journal devoted to online news outdated? Read more here.

PaidContent purchased for $30 million – It’s not every day a single blogger turns a passion for reporting on the online news business into a sustainable enterprise and then gets bought out for a reported $30 million. But that’s what happened to Rafat Ali, founder of PaidContent, a six-year-old news site covering all types of paid-content business models, which he sold last week to Guardian News and Media, a British newspaper publisher. By Ali’s account, Guardian will run ContentNext, the parent company Ali started to run PaidContent and several related blogs, as a stand-alone business. Read all the details here.

If there was ever a need for a scholarly discussion of online media it is now, when more people are turning away from newspapers and to the Internet for their news.

But don’t tell that to the University of Southern California. Earlier this week, the university’s Annenberg School of Journalism pulled the plug on the Online Journalism Review, an e-zine that spent 12 years chronically the growth and development of the online news business.

According to Niles, USC will continue to help mid-career journalists learn new media skills through its affiliation with the Knight Digital Media Center.

In a June 16 post on the site, OJR’s Robert Niles told readers: “The decision to suspend OJR for now means that I have left the University of Southern California. But I am not going offline. I will continue to write, daily, about new media and journalism at my new website, SensibleTalk.com.”

SensibleTalk will pick up where OJR left off, according to Niles, who’s running the site with his wife and fellow journalist Laurie. He envisions it as “a community for journalists who want to speak truth to power, and for readers who want to do the same. That’s why I call the site ‘analysis from the reality-based world.’”

According to Niles, the site will include interviews with journalism entrepreneurs, educators and reporters, Q&As with politicians and activists, and resources for journalists, such as a math tutorial he developed several years ago