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come a long way – I was the editor of my college newspaper and I can tell you, way back when, we were happy with the outdated typography equipment and darkroom gear we could scrap together.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?

Ever since LinkedIn added a status update feature, the online business network’s members who blog – including lots of writers – have used it to let people know when they put new material online.

Now LinkedIn’s made it even easier for bloggers to flag friends and acquaintances about new posts. The networking company has partnered with leading blog software platforms WordPress and Six Apart to display LinkedIn members’ most recent blog posts directly in their LinkedIn profiles.

Adding your WordPress or SixApart blog to your LinkedIn profile is pretty simple. Go to LinkedIn’s new Application Directory page and click on the icon for the blog software you use – the WordPress icon works for Wordpress.com blogs and self-hosted blogs that use WordPress.org. You’ll see a bunch of other applications on this page, I’ll talk about those in a minute. Now do the following:

1. Click on the icon to go to an application preview page for your particular blogging software. Check the boxes to have your blog appear in your profile, and on the LinkedIn homepage, and then click on “Update settings.”

2. Next you’ll see a preview page that displays what your blog posts will look like on LinkedIn. Click on the “Edit” link to choose whether to have all of your blog posts show up on LinkedIn, or only blog posts that you’ve tagged “LinkedIn.”

3. If you choose to only have blog posts tagged “LinkedIn” show up, you’ve got to make sure to go to your blog and add a “LinkedIn” tag to all those posts.

4. Once you’ve added your blog to your LinkedIn profile, fellow LinkedIn users will be able to click on the blog header to go to the blog’s homepage, or on a blog post title to go to that post.

I added WordCount to my LinkedIn profile this morning. Start to finish it took about a minute. You can see what my updated profile looks like here. You can watch a video from WordPress about the new feature here.

LinkedIn’s new blogging feature is one of several applications the network is trying in a beta test of Open Social, an open-source application programming interface, or API. Developed by Google and a bunch of development partners, Open Social makes it simpler to create software programs that work across multiple Websites. But unless you’re a software developer, the only thing you really need to know about Open Social is that because of it, you should expect to see more of these mini-programs popping up on your favorite social networks, blogs and other Websites in the future.

Newspapers see the future, and it’s digital. The latest evidence: earlier this week the New York Times Co. and three other investors sank $29.5 million into Automattic, the company that makes WordPress blogging software runs the WordPress.com free blogging Website. (Disclaimer: I use WordPress.com to create and host this blog.)

According to a news report, the Times was the smallest of the four investors – the others were venture capital firms. But the deal solidifies the paper’s existing relationship with Automattic, which the Times uses to host about 50 blogs, as well as About.com, the Internet information service it acquired in 2005.

As the Times investments illustrate, newspapers’ embrace of digital media has moved beyond erecting Web sites and asking reporters to write blogs. Consider:

• E.W. Scripps, the Cincinnati media conglomerate, is so jazzed about the prospects of its TV and online ventures the company is set to spin them off into a separate public company later this year.
• Ruport Murdoch, new owner of the Wall Street Journal, told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday that he will keep subscriptions for the paper’s online version, though prices will be higher and some “commodity” financial information will be free.
• I’ve already written about how the Los Angeles Times’ Innovations (read Web site) editor, Russ Stanton, is being mentioned as a front runner for the now vacant editor-in-chief gig.

At the same time, newspapers’ economic prospects are looking dim. The latest on that front: the Orange County Register, my old stomping grounds and the place I got started as a tech reporter, is killing its stand-alone Business section and folding it into the News section in one of several cost-cutting measures. When it does, it’ll be the only major daily in the country without a separate Business section. Ouch.

What does it mean for freelancers? Bone up on your coding skills. Seriously, as newspapers go through this transition to digital, it’s more important than ever to keep up with the times, and the Times. Maintaining a blog is one way. Seeking out Web-based work is another. If you don’t believe me, this blog post from Publishing 2.0 called The Only Way for Journalists to Understand the Web is Use It says it a lot more eloquently than I can.

That leads me back to Automattic. The investment is great news for the two-year-old start up, whose major competition includes Blogger, which Google bought in 2003. Other blogging software makers don’t have such deep pockets, but there are a lot of them, including Six Apart, which makes Movable Type and TypePad, plus a host of smaller proprietary and open-source blogging software makers. Automattic said it will use the investment to beef up projects like Akismet, a blog comment spam blocker.

 Updated on February 27, 2008: Thanks to the sharp-eyed reader who pointed out that WordPress is open source software. Automattic uses it to run the WordPress.com blogging Website.