You’ll have to subscribe to the paper in print or online or borrow a copy from a friend to see AOL to Produce News, Video by the Numbers in its entirety. But here are some of the relevant details:

• AOL will rely on a new digital newsroom system that uses computer algorithms to predict what types of stories, videos or photos will be popular, then assign articles accordingly.
• Here’s where freelancers come in. Stories will be assigned to freelancers via a new Web site called Seed.com. According to the story, AOL already works with a network of 3,000 freelancers but is looking to increase that number through Seed.com, “which is open to anyone looking to submit a story.” In other words, not necessarily professional writers. Note: The Seed.com website isn’t much to look at just yet, but they will take your email address and promise to get back to you after they launch, if you’re so inclined.
• Under the new system, AOL’s freelance fees will range from nothing up front and a share of ad revenue to more than $100 per story.
• According to the WSJ story, AOL will offer advertisers “the chance to work with its editorial team to create custom content.” In other words custom publishing. While there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s not exactly journalism, and hopefully won’t be labeled as such.

The WSJ story used the recent baby crib recall as an example of how AOL’s new system would work. If the new system had been up and running, according to the article, the company’s number-crunching wizardry would have determined that people were interested in seeing more stories on the subject, which would have prompted editors to assign more stories.

To which I can only say: no duh. Any editor worth their salt would have come to the same conclusion, and wouldn’t have needed a lot of computer algorithms to do it.

All this is being directed by Tim Armstrong, the former Google advertising exec who’s slated to take over as AOL’s CEO when Time Warner completes spinning off the Internet company in December.

Some of my freelance friends are already up in arms over the whole situation. They’re ready to put AOL into the same group as Demand Studios, Associated Content, Helium, Studio101 and other sites that I’ve called content aggregators but other freelancers have dubbed content mills for the paltry amounts they pay, whether to professional writers or hobbyists, to churn out how-tos and other articles based on topics that are more prized for how high they’ll turn up in keyword searches than for their reportage.

But other freelancers I know who work on AOL’s blogs and other news enterprises have nothing but good things to say about the working conditions, including friendly editors and decent money.

For now, it remains to be seen whether AOL’s new endeavor will turn out to be a legitimate new market for freelance work, or give new meaning to the term bad seed.

Whatever happens, it’s also worth noting that AOL is the latest in a string of companies that most people would identify as technology ventures getting into the media business, a growing list that includes Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. As newspapers continue to struggle, are these tech giants the real future of the news?

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.

Forbes just announced yet another layoff. Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek from McGraw Hill for a song. Fortune’s scaling back the number of issues it will produce next year. The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau. Advertising in other business publications has fallen precipitously. Carr suggests that a lot of what passed for business journalism was aspirational in nature, showing would-be captains of industry the prescribed formula to follow if they wanted to be the next Wall Street millionaire. Now that the mighty have fallen, he reasons, people have stopped caring about the the publications that praised them.

While I buy into the fact that the print business press has suffered what might be a fatal blow, it’s not the end of the world for business reporting.

For every Forbes or BusinessWeek that’s downsizing or sold, new publications are popping up online. New entities might not have the gravitas of the old ones. But they don’t have the overhead either. That might be bad in the short run – not as much money equals not as many resources to do investigative pieces or go after the important stories of the day. But at least they’ve got a better shot at living to see another day.

Some of these new publications aren’t really new. One of the best business stories of the year was The Giant Pool of Money, a listener-friendly take on how we got into the present economic mess in the first place, that was a collaboration between NPR and American Public Media’s quirky radio show This American Life. It was such a hit NPR is now teaming up with local public broadcasters on EconomyStory.org, a website that will showcase all the parties’ economy-related reporting.

Other new outlets for business news are starting up all the time. Two I’m acquainted with because I’ve done some work for them: MoneyWatch.com, created by CBS earlier this year, and a still in beta start-up on personal finance for women.

The old guard of online business news, sites such as MarketWatch.com, The Street, The Motley Fool and CNNMoney are still going strong, as are newer outfits such as VentureBeat and The Business Insider.

So, while some of the big glossies might be fading into the sunset, the genre can hardly be said to be dying.

If you cover business, where’s your work coming from these days?

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.

Many finalist projects are the work of traditional newspaper companies that have invested major time and money into their digital news efforts. As you would expect, the New York Times, Washington Post Digital, BBC News and other big-time publishers are well-represented, along with a handful of small and medium-sized papers – including two here in Oregon, the Oregonian for its poignant series on a pregnant woman’s battle with cancer, and the Daily Astorian for its breaking coverage of a plane crash in a nearby beach town.

But many finalists are online-only publications that aim to pick up where cash-strapped newspapers have left off, especially on investigative news. One of the most ambitious is The Chauncey Bailey Project, a collaboration between more than two dozen reporters, photographers and editors from 23 Bay Area print, broadcast and online news organizations. They worked together to investigate the Aug. 2., 2007, shooting death of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey while he was investigating suspicious activities at a local business. Back in the day, competitive news organizations wouldn’t have dreamed of voluntarily entering into such a collaboration, which goes to show just how much times have changed.

Some other finalists projects from online-only publications:

• Women.Children.Crisis – An online “gateway” run by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting that compiles stories from multiple international sources about the adversities and dangers faced by women and children in crisis situations.
• Muckety – A daily news and information site based on online databases, research and old-fashioned journalism that maps “the paths of power and influence.”
• A staggering swindle - A multi-part, mulitmedia investigation of how a local man used the “easy money excesses of the housing boom” to scam $12.5 million from fake condo sales, by VoicesofSanDiego.org, an independent nonprofit hyperlocal news site.

2009 Online Journalism Award winners will be announced on Saturday, Oct. 3, at the conclusion of the Online News Association annual convention in San Francisco.

From what I’ve heard, the last few ONA conventions have been well worth attending, but I’m predicting this year’s will be the best ever. The pace of change in the news business has accelerated. More laid off reporters and editors are looking for ways to reshape their careers in an online mold. Content management systems, mobile apps and other tech tools have reached a level of maturity and cost that makes them manageable and affordable for even the smallest online publisher. I’m excited to be making the trip – and while I’m there I’ll reporting on what I learn.

If you’re going to ONA let me know – I’d love to host a meetup of fellow freelancers to talk about how independent writers fit into the new world of online news.

At last weekend’s BarCampPortland III meetup, the assembled developers, programmers and Web 2.0 entrepreneurs were just as concerned about the fate of the news business as the smattering of old-school journalists who dragged themselves out of bed for the bad coffee and good conversation.

The techies wanted to know all kinds of things: Why are newspaper headlines misleading? Will micropayments – the vending machine model for paying for news stories – work? Should bloggers hold themselves to the same ethical constraints as reporters? Just what are those ethical constraints? Should bloggers be reporters? Should reporters be bloggers? Is hyperlocal news making money? And just how hyper is your local?

All excellent questions. The free-flowing discussion that followed touched on a lot of them without providing a lot of answers, at least not any definitive ones. But it was a start.

If the number of tech-slash-news geeks at BarCamp was any indication, Portland is a hive of activity on the hyperlocal news front. No less than three online community news ventures were represented: Neighborhood Notes; OurPDX.com and The Portland Sentinel, a monthly paper in North Portland with a daily news website. In case you hadn’t heard, PDX TV station KATU is looking to hire a Web producer to write, curate and publish local stories on KATU.com.

BarCamp took place the day after The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., filed for bankruptcy protection, making talk of the future of the news all the more pressing. The Columbian sent a trio of newsroom staffers to BarCamp, including John Hill, the journalist turned journalism IT guy who wrote the ‘how hyper is your local’ blog post I linked to higher in this piece.

Guys like Hill, and Michelle Nicolosi, the executive producer at the newly only-only SeattlePI.com, and Kate Cohen and Donna Wares, co-bloggers at the SealBeachDaily community news site in California could be the salvation of the news business. They and a new breed of hybrid tech-news entrepreneur, like Steve Walling, a Portland writer and consultant who’s involved with projects like AboutUs.org and WikiProjectOregon.

Here in Portland, the conversation that started at BarCamp is continuing. As I write this, Abraham Hyatt, another Portland journalist who’s tracking the online news business, is planning a digital news meetup for sometime in August. Stay tuned for details. And tell a techie friend.