At the risk of over sharing, and after spending some time calculating my own revenue for the first half of 2009, my conclusions are: bad, but not as bad as they could be.

Bad, because old clients don’t have as much money to spend. Not as bad as they could be because there are – surprise, surprise – publications of various shapes and sizes out there with money to spend.

Before I get to the numbers, a brief explanation of my writing business. I practice what I call the contributing writer model of freelance writing. For just about as long as I’ve worked as an independent writer, my preferred business model has been to write for a handful of publications – wire services, newspapers, trade magazines and websites – on a regular if not monthly basis. As a former newspaper staff writer it’s what I’m most comfortable with. And it doesn’t require as much marketing effort as constantly sending out letters of introduction and queries to editors I don’t know.

This business model still worked for me in 2008, when my top two clients accounted for 72 percent of my work.

Not so in 2009. In the first six months of the year, work from my two biggest clients fell 39 percent and 71 percent respectively. Ouch and double ouch. Work for a few other regulars stayed steady or increased slightly.

My saving grace: work from new clients, a handful of publications I hadn’t worked for before, which increased 89 percent during the first six months of the year. It wasn’t enough to completely make up the difference, leaving me with a 15 percent decline in revenue for the first half of the year. Not great, but compared to GM, none too shabby either.

Until I did these calculations I didn’t realize how much I needed to innovate and beat the bushes for new relationships. Although it takes me out of my comfort zone – and really, who likes that? – it’s obviously something I must do, and in fact, have already begun. In the past several weeks, I’ve nabbed my first assignment from a national writers’ magazine, and am waiting to hear back from an organization that could throw some interesting work my way.

There’s an upside to pushing beyond the familiar. If and when things get better and work picks up from my old standbys, I’ll have my pick of assignments. If it doesn’t, I’ve cultivated a crop of what I hope will be my new regulars.

What have you learned about your own freelance business this year?

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.