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.

The show, called “The Rebirth of Local Journalism,” airs live tomorrow, Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 9 a.m.

I’ll be one of the guests on the show, along with several other Portland and Oregon journalists who’ve made it their business to keep tabs on the local media scene.

The WeMaketheMedia. com conference, which takes place at UO’s Turnbull Center in downtown Portland on Saturday, is looking at what it would take to start a non-profit investigative journalism initiative in the area. Even if you can’t attend, you can get a taste of what they’ll be discussing by reading these working papers the group’s organizers have put together in advance of the event.

If you miss the OPB live broadcast, you can catch a podcast of the segment after it airs. Once a link’s available I’ll include it here.

The first Digital Journalism social hour takes place Thursday, Sept. 24, at 7 p.m., at the Lucky Lab pub in S.E. Portland. See this post on the Digital Journalism blog for an address, map and more details.

Hyatt had been searching for a way to keep up the momentum created by the inaugural Digital Journalism Camp, a day-long conference with sessions that covered multimedia story telling, hyperlocal news and more and was attended by about 150 local reporters, editors and other media types.

According to Hyatt, the SPJ was interested in getting into the picture and wanted to start sooner rather than later, thus the short notice for the first gathering.

The Sept. 24 social hour will feature a presentation on Portland Media Lab, a digital journalism venture started by Portland Sentinel publisher Cornelius Swart. Hyatt and SPJ’s Libby Tucker are lining up guest presenters for later meetings.

In case you can’t make it next week, mark your calendar for the next meeting, which is slated for Thursday, Oct. 29, at the same time and location.

Between meetings, follow Digital Journalism news and happenings on Twitter at @journopdx.

• Can the techies save the news? – If  the scene at the recent BarCampPortland III meet up was any indication, that could very well be the case.
• The Smalltown News – Small newspapers are in a better shape than big ones to survive the recession and changing news business, according to this story I did for Oregon Business magazine.
• Room to write – No office space at home but hate working in coffee shops? Portland’s got plenty of communal workspaces for writers, part of a nationwide trend of shared workplaces.
• WordPress user group forms - The more writers take to blogging, the more call there is for places they can go for training, and this group is one of them.
• Portland is for word lovers – It only follows that the city with the country’s best independent book store and most active public library system would host a rockin’ annual book festival. Wordstock is it.
• City debates whether bloggers are reporters – In a scene that’s starting to repeat itself across the country, the Portland suburb of Lake Oswego debates whether to allow a local blogger into city meetings.
• While other papers sink, the Oregonian swims – I wrote this before the paper’s latest rounds of job cuts and salary reductions. But Portland’s daily is still publishing seven days a week, isn’t in bankruptcy and has managed to keep some of the country’s top feature writers and sports columnists – these days, that’s saying a lot.