It was the year reporters and editors said goodbye to thousands of staff jobs at newspapers and magazines that downsized or folded.

It was the year conferences went digital, Twitter went viral and the bad economy made every writer a business reporter.

It was the year phrases like hyperlocal, meetup and content aggregators entered freelancers’ lexicon.

It was the year of the mobile app, the multimedia story, SEO tags and crowdsourcing.

It’s only fitting that as we say goodbye to 2009, and with it the first decade of the 21st century, we also bid farewell to journalism practices of yesterday and embraces those of the future as the media business leaves print behind (more or less) for an online-only world and all the changes, risks and opportunities that come with it.

With that in mind, here are my picks for the top media trends of last year, and what they mean for independent writers in 2010:

Content aggregators – They’ve been called mills, farms, and in one case even demonic. I’ll stick with the more neutral-sounding content aggregators to describe sites such as Demand Studios, Associated Content, Helium, and possibly AOL’s new Seed.com. All those sites are hiring freelancers to churn out thousands of SEO-enabled how-to pieces and other “articles” a day in hopes the information will show up high in Google search rankings thereby maximizing the proprietors’ online advertising earnings. The debate over the opportunity these sites present for freelance writers has raged on here and on other freelance blogs for the better part of the year, and media industry heavyweights have weighing in with their (mostly) negative opinions.
Takeaway for freelancers: Content aggregators are here to stay, at least for the short term – although recent changes Google’s made to its search algorithm could affect them in the long run. Also here to stay are a contingent of writers happy for the query-free gigs these sites offer, even if the rates they pay are pitifully low when calculated on a piece-by-piece basis. I remain unconvinced of the merit of doing this type of work, though understand its attraction to someone breaking into the freelance business or with limited time or desire to pitch stories.

Hyperlocal – From the everything-old-is-new-again department. Never have so many been so interested in what’s happening in your Zip Code, your voting precinct, your city block or rural postal route. They are to the news business what nanotechnology is to the tech industry. From biggies like MSNBC, AOL and Examiner.com’s billionaire owner Philip Anschutz to tiny startups, hyperlocal is everywhere. According to Knight Citizen News Network, journalists and hobbyists have started more than 800 hyperlocal sites to date. But will they last? Some are already shutting down. The cofounders of one ambitious southern California hyperlocal project – both long-time journalists – opted to shutter their site at the end of 2009 despite accolades, ads and a partnership with their area’s major metro daily. Why? They couldn’t scale the business to make it profitable without taking on more employees – and the cost that comes with them – a step they were unwilling to take.
Takeaway for freelancers: Hyperlocal remains a viable alternative to working for content aggregators. But like aggregators they don’t pay much. Treat it like the experiment it is. Include work for hyperlocal sites in a broader assignment mix so if a venture goes under you’re not stuck. Or if you go on staff, treat it like a stint at a community newspaper – which is basically what it is – and gauge how long you’re willing to stay for the experience and clips you’ll gain. If you’re interested in starting one of these on your own, you can apply for one of 9 grants of $25,000 each that American University’s J-Lab is awarding for community news sites this year. Applications are due March 1.l

Nonprofit news – This year, everybody who wasn’t busy creating a hyperlocal news site was putting together a 501c3 to start a nonprofit news venture (actually, some were one and the same). According to popular thinking, if nobody’s making money from advertising anymore, why bother, just start out as a nonprofit and hunt for financing through grants, corporate sponsorships, subscriptions and donations. So far it’s working for sites such as MinnPost, Voice of San Diego and ProPublica, which have raised hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars respectively. The bigger question: whether it’s a model that dozens, or hundreds of other ventures can successfully duplicate, similar to the country’s public radio stations. As a matter of fact, don’t rule out the country’s public radio stations as a source of nonprofit news innovation, as stations such as Oregon Public Broadcasting are busy working to expand their coverage areas and the news they dish up on their websites.
Takeaway for freelancers: Nonprofits aren’t the backwater they used to be, especially if an organization is savvy or lucky enough to get backed by Knight Digital Media or another source of major grant funding. Most of these enterprises are being started by ex-newspaper or magazine journalists – meaning if you write for them you’re more likely to get high-quality editing, always good for the clips file.

User generated content – Where to begin. User-generated content is old news if you think of it in terms of YouTube and Facebook. But it’s catching on in new ways. For example, in a different type of user-generated content, more companies are choosing to bypass newspapers and magazines and instead of advertising, starting custom publications, especially online. Expect these types of projects to flourish in 2010 (Disclaimer: I started working on one of them not long ago). Is it journalism? Yes, and no. Sponsored content is after all, sponsored content. But some sponsors understand that for their publications to be taken seriously they have to present information that’s reported and presented like the real deal. The more well-known user-generated content trend is of course the reader comments, videos, etc., that more publications are building into what they do. Expect to see newspapers, magazines and websites do even more of this in 2010.
Takeaway for freelancers: If you don’t already do work for custom publications, now’s the time to look into it. Don’t think you have to pitch publishers of custom publications for the work. If you’ve written for corporate clients in the past, why not pitch them on a news site, or even an e-newsletter. Another options: introducing yourself to one of the growing crop of digital media agencies that produce online-only custom publications. As for the other kind of user-generated content – any writer running a blog or specialized social network has to think about ways to maximize reader involvement.

Entrepreneurship - With so many journalists getting laid off, it was inevitable some would go into business for themselves. Unlike long-time solo writers – such as yours truly – these reporters and editors don’t want to identify themselves as “freelancers,” a word that for better or worse still connotes a lower status word worker in some circles. Besides, some portion of these newly unleashed writers are opting to steer their own destinies rather than wait for editors to answer their queries, so calling them entrepreneurial journalists fits. What are these EJs doing? Creating news apps for iPhones and Androids. Working on the hyperlocal and nonprofit news ventures above. Creating technology platforms or providing the training journalists or newspapers need to their jobs better in the future.
The takeaway for freelancers: There’s never been a better time to start something on your own. The tools are abundant and free or close to it.  In cities such as Portland and New York, it’s relatively easy to find coworking spaces dedicated to writers or start ups or both. There’s also a wealth of information online and

Twitter - At the start of the year Twitter was still Facebook’s little brother, a circus sideshow fun for goofing off on but not really anything you could use for business. At least that was the perception. But as the year wore on and more publications and writers opened accounts, it became apparent Twitter could be used not just to research stories but tell them too. Dan Baum drove this point home when he took to Twitter to tell his tale of being fired from The New Yorker. If that wasn’t enough, there was always coverage of the plane landing in the Hudson, the Iranian election protests and Michael Jackson’s death to convince you Twitter had arrived as a news source.
Takeaway for freelancers: If you haven’t hopped on Twitter yet, now’s the time. Don’t worry about how you’ll use it, at least not at first. Give yourself some time to play around with it and see how things work. Then come up with a plan that fits into your writing business. You read more of my advice on how writers can use Twitter on this blog post and this one.

Other trends: the wave of online-only startup publications on all matter of subjects will increase; blogging will remain big; more publications and writers will experiment with mobile apps; and writers will see publications’ freelance budgets increase, though not all will return to pre-2008 levels.

Got your own picks for the major media industry trends of the past year?

Happy Twitter anniversary to me. I joined Twitter exactly one year ago today. It took a little convincing, but once I figured out how to incorporate it into my freelance business I never looked back.

Earlier today, I tweeted the following lessons learned from my first year on the microblogging service, 17 in honor of joining on Dec. 17, 2008. Every one of them is 140 characters or less.

What I’ve learned:

1 – Be real. People can see through a fake, even online. Therefore, don’t use auto–DMs.

2 – One note may work for a samba, but not online. Don’t tweet on same topic 24/7, even if you’re here for work.

3 – Don’t drink and tweet. But if you do, the next day, delete the tweets. (I got that tip from a Twitterati.)

4 – You don’t have to DM every new follower, esp. once you hit 2,000+. But do DM those you want to know better.

5 – Lists are great organizational tools, but if you follow a lot of people, building them’s a bear.

6 – While good in theory, #FF is hard to keep up, especially if like me, all deadlines seem to fall on Fridays.

7 – Twitter is just a tool. It will not find you customers or make you rich. You do that. All it does is help.

8 – As a writer, Twitter forces me to be concise and use colorful words and phrases. It’s my robo-copydesk.

9 – Twitter is not texting. Some people may be OK with abbreviating everything; for me, that’s too hard to read.

10 – Hashtags and conferences go together. There’s no better way to promote one or report from one. However…

11 – …As recent events have shown, Twitter at meetings can lead to mean-spirited back-channel snark.

12 – Saved Search is handy for tracking subjects you’ll be writing about. I use it like Google News alerts.

13 – Trending Topics is worthless, unless you use it as an obituary tracker. Otherwise, it’s too easy to game.

14 – Spam, porn, phishing, malware, scams: as Twitter’s user base has grown, so has its smarmy underbelly.

15 – Twitter is a conversation, which means you can’t do all the talking. Stop, look, listen, and retweet.

16 – Twitter collapses the space between you and that famous publisher or CEO, but you still gotta make your case.

17 – Blogging and Twitter go together like cheese and crackers: you can have one without the other but it’s not as good.

That’s it. If you’ve used Twitter a year or longer, what wisdom can you share?

By the way, I wrote the first draft of this on Twitter in real time. It was easier than I thought.

When it comes to Twitter, does it feel like the parade’s passing you by?

Don’t let the fact that 50 million people discovered it before you stop you from giving it a whirl. If you have a blog, Twitter is not only a good way to promote your blog, it’s also an idea factory you scan for things to write about, and a virtual hangout you can visit to discuss the latest blogging issues and trends.

Here to make a convincing argument for integrating Twitter into your blogging life is Jane Boursaw, an entertainment industry writer and blogger at TV Squad, Film Gecko and more. If you like what you see, consider taking Jane’s upcoming blogging class, which she mention’s at the end of the post. Hit it Jane:

Blogging and Twitter: The Perfect Match

For better or worse, Twitter seems to be here to stay, and that’s a good thing for bloggers. I manage five Twitter accounts for my various blogs, and get tons of traffic coming from Twitter for each one. Here are five tips and tricks to help you blend Twitter into your blogging life:

1. Feed those blog posts. No, I don’t mean give them grains and veggies. I’m talking about feeding your blog posts automatically into Twitter. There are several programs to do this, including TwitterFeed.com, but my current favorite is RSS2Twitter. The site is clean and simple, it supports multiple Twitter accounts, and once you sign up and set up your Twitter accounts, it starts immediately feeding your posts into Twitter automatically. No muss, no fuss.

2. Access Twitter easily. There are a number of programs to help you keep track of your Twitter followers and traffic, including TweetDeck, TweetGrid, and Tweetie. My favorite is Seesmic.com. Basically, what these do is provide a place to easily update Twitter, manage conversations with @replies and direct messages, stay organized with groups, see what’s trending, and manage multiple Twitter accounts easily.

3. Check out Twitter’s Help section. It’s a little bewildering getting up to speed on all the Twitter-speak like hash-tags, RTs, @names, trending topics, and everything else. Twitter actually has a great Help section that helps to sort it all out. So if you’re ever stumped on anything, that’s a great resource.

4. Build your followers. If your Twitter goal is to help build your brand and niche -– and not just to tell people what you’re having for lunch – the more followers you have, the more you’ll spread the word about your blog. To get followers, follow others, but focus on people and groups within your niche. For example, to build my niche of entertainment and get people clicking through to my blogs, I follow lots of people and groups in the movie, TV and celebrity niche.

5. Include updates that aren’t blog posts. It’s considered bad form (by whomever created the social media rules) to have ONLY blog posts going into your Twitter account. So in addition to your blog posts (which should be automatically feeding into your Twitter account – see Item #1), be sure to include Twitter updates about other fun things in your niche.

For more on Twitter, social media, and all things blogging related, sign up for my online class, Blogging for Passion and Profit. The next six-week session starts Monday, Oct. 26, 2009, but feel free to sign up after Monday, as well, and I’ll get the lessons headed your way. Email me if you have any questions or need more info, jboursaw@charter.net.

Jane Boursaw blogs at TV Squad, Film Gecko, CliqueClack, Ruby Shoes, and ifollo.com. Home base is Reel Life With Jane.

Twitter wants its new Lists feature “to go nuts.”

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams said as much when he talked about the new feature – which the company rolled out in wide beta yesterday – at the recent Online News Association conference in San Francisco.

Twitter has been working behind the scenes on a Lists feature for some time, but this is the first glimpse of it most of its millions of users have had.

The Lists feature lets users organize followers into groups that other Twitter users can see and follow. It’s like the TweetDeck groups function  – only better, because it can be shared.

A Lists tab now appears in the right-hand features column on a Twitter user’s profile page, along with Trending Topics, Saved Searches and Followers.

To create a list, click on the New List link and give the new list you’re creating a name. You can then add followers to it by clicking on a person’s Twitter user name and then on the Lists button that appears at the top of their profile page to the left of the tools button. Clicking on the Lists button opens a drop-down menu that displays every list you’ve created, which allows you to add someone to one or more lists. The List feature also lets you create a new list anytime you pull up someone’s profile page.

Another key feature of the List function: you can can keep lists private or make them public, in which case anyone on the network can see what lists you’ve created and who’s on them. People can also sign up to follow your lists – more on how that could be a good thing for journalists and other writers in a minute.

According to Williams, the potential uses for Twitter lists are huge. “We created a list of people who work at Twitter,” he told a SRO crowd at the  October ONA conference in San Francisco. “You could do a list of funny people, favorite journalists, and as a way to crowdsource. You could have a list of everyone at this conference to see what they were saying. It’s about controlling the information flow.”

Not every Twitter user is going to go to the trouble of creating lists – for one thing, if you’re following hundreds or thousands of people on Twitter, creating lists and then categorizing all those people into one or more of them could take hours (unless somebody designs an app for that though I’m not sure how they’d do that).

But Williams expects that journalists will be among the number that do. “Jouranlists will curate these lists. That would be a value add, just like editing is,” he told the convention audience.

Twitter’s List function is the latest evidence that the service is best thought of as a network, not a destination, Williams says. It’s an underlying technology that other companies will use to build stuff on – like many Twitter app builders already do. “The list content will be available through the API and through widgets that journalists or media organizations can take and put on their site and integrate in interesting ways,” he says. ” That will make it much more powerful.”

Two weeks passed between the time I heard Williams talk at ONA and the Lists feature went into wide beta, giving me plenty of time to think about how I’d start using the service when it came out. At least initially, I’m using it to segment the people and organizations I follow on the network into the following categories, which you can see on MichelleRafter’s Lists:

• Subjects I write about on a regular basis, including tech, finance, small business, workplace issues and media
• Fellow freelance writers
• News people and organizations
• Portland people, places and events
• A feed for this blog

Other journalists, writers and bloggers are using it in different ways. Here are a few examples:

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, a blog about search engines, set up lists for each of the major search engine providers he writes about, Google and Microsoft, as well as for other subjects he writes about, such as search marketing and social media. If you clicked on any of those links, you’d have discovered they take you right to that list – which means you can share them on blogs like this one, and on Twitter (as in, ‘Hey, check out this cool list Danny Sullivan published called @DannySullivan/Potpourri‘)

Robert Scoble, aka The Scobelizer, the noted Silicon Valley techie blogger and hard-core Twitter user, has already created 20 lists, which is the maximum number any one person can create right now, including one for People I have met – a substitute for keeping sources’ business cards perhaps? – and another for analysts that track subjects he follows. Scoble also follows 20 lists created by other people, including a couple from Danny Sullivan, but also a list of entrepreneurs created by Twitter product designer Vitor Lourenco.

Josh Weinberger, managing editor of CRM magazine, a computer industry trade publication, created a list for conferences and trade shows he’s attended, going to attend or just curious about; PR people he deals with, and The New Yorker, for when he wants to do a little light reading.

These examples are from hard-core tech geeks. But they’re not the only writer types who could benefit from using Twitter lists.

This morning I read Matea Gold’s Los Angeles Times story, Demi v. Perez? See Twitter, on the celebrity feuds taking place on the microblogging network. Gold, the paper’s TV reporter, could easily set up lists to track broadcast and cable TV networks, TV show fan websites, and in the case of today’s story, actress Demi Moore, blogger Perez Hilton and the other celebs mentioned.

Are you using Twitter Lists? If so, I’d love to hear how you’re using them for research, reporting or other writing-related activities.

It wasn’t so long ago I was telling anyone who’d listen why I didn’t use Twitter.

Then I started using Twitter.

And never stopped. For the last eight months I’ve tweeted every day, with the occasional weekend off. I tweet eight, 10, 12 times a day: when I put up a new blog post, when one of my stories is published, when I need a source, when a random thought simply needs to be shared – though in hindsight some of those would have been better left unsaid.

Until last week.

I took an honest-to-goodness vacation away from email, blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn and everything connected to being connected.

Guess what?

The sky didn’t fall. The earth stayed on its axis. And the bottom didn’t fall out of my business – I even had a few assignments in my inbox when I got back.

It was easier than I thought to unplug. It helped to be stuck with the middle of nowhere, the only available Internet access whatever could be siphoned off a neighbor’s unsecured wireless connection.

Going without was good for the soul and apparently didn’t hurt my standing on Twitter – I returned to a few dozen new followers.

So how to unplug?

Tell people you’re leaving. If you stop tweeting without explanation, followers may think you’ve given up on Twitter. Give them a head’s up. If you don’t want to broadcast the fact that you’re leaving town for safety reasons, be a bit cagey about what you’re doing. “I’ll be taking a break from here for the next few days” works. So does “Busy elsewhere. See everyone in a week.”

Automate. If you can’t bear going a whole week without saying something, use a tool such as TweetLater or TwitResponse to send tweets at predesignated intervals in your absence.

Go mobile. Leave your laptop home and tweet from your iPhone or BlackBerry using an application like Twitterrific, PocketTweets or TwitterBerry. Twitter’s applications list has a lot more.

Tweet from vacation, sparingly. Who wants to spend their precious downtime tethered to a machine, even if it’s only a cell phone? Limit the number of times you log on. Or allow yourself a specific time of day or amount of time to check in, update your status and upload vacation pics.

Then go play.

Got your own story of going off the social media grid? Share!

Dear Twitter:

There’s not much I don’t love about Twitter. Since another writer convinced me to join last December, I’ve used it almost every day to find sources, do research, track events, report the news and kibbutz with friends.

But over the months, the amount of spam that’s showing up on the network has risen along with the number of new users. And more of that spam is X-rated

Yesterday was a new low. I clicked on the profile of someone who’d just started following me and saw the most graphic pornography I’ve ever encountered on Twitter, a photograph the spammer put up as their profile photo. It was a shock to say the least. And it could have been worse – my eight-year-old was in my office at the time. Good thing he was preoccupied with the TV.

I get that some people go online for porn. I also get that Twitter doesn’t want people to jump through a lot of security hoops to join, all the better for millions more to sign up.

But nobody should have to worry about what they’ll find when they open an email from Twitter notifying them of a new follower, or when they click on their Followers list.

So I’m asking, on my behalf, and for all of the other Twitter users out there who don’t want to be afraid of their inbox – stop the porn spam. Giving people a Twitter account to report spam is a start. Letting people block followers they don’t want to in their Followers list or to see tweets from is also good.

But it’s not enough. Figure out some kind of pre-screening mechanism. Maybe some of the Twitter apps that are out there can already screen for this stuff. For the time being, I’ve turned off email notification so I won’t get messages about new followers, just in case.

I’ve done my share of evangelizing Twitter to coworkers, family and friends. But this is giving me second thoughts. My daughter’s on Twitter – what if she’d gotten that porn spam instead of me?

Come on Twitter, help us out.

Twitter is revolutionizing the way people gather and disseminate news, and today there’s no better example of that than what’s happening in Iran.

After Friday’s hotted contested presidential elections saw the apparent re-election of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by a landslide, supporters of challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi took to the streets in what looks to be the biggest rioting and protests since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

In the past 72 hours, Iranian citizens and traditional news organizations have taken to Twitter, blogs and other social networks to share what’s happening with the world. Through short reports on the social network, photos on Flickr and newspaper websites, live blog updates and video feeds, activists and observers are recording what is happening in the country, which has shut down other forms of communication.

Other quick take aways from what’s happening:

** As foreign press are being threatened and asked to leave the country, lines between trained journalists and citizen journalists are blurring. Man-on-the-street reports, photos and video of what’s happening are coming from a variety of sources, making it more critical than ever that news gathering organizations use their experience and professional standards to act as curators and pull together multimedia packages from various information sources and make sure people know what those sources are.

** In a Twitter world, people want constant coverage and complain when they don’t get it. When CNN and other networks didn’t provide the kind of 24/7 coverage U.S. viewers wanted they took their protests to Twitter. In fact, Twitter’s become so important to the news, when the company announced a service interruption for scheduled maintenance at what would have been Tuesday morning in Iran, subscribers made such a stink the work was rescheduled to occur at 1:30 a.m. Tehran time.

** For a well-curated sample of what’s happening in Tehran, plus continuing commentary of how mainstream media and other are covering it, check out Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish column at TheAtlantic.com.

Here’s what I’ve been reading this week:

Help me investigate: Paul Bradshaw on Crowdsourcing Investigative Reporting – Video interview with a U.K. journalist and Online Journalism blogger on how he’s building a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism.

5 things Sesame Street can teach you about blogging – Keep it varied, repeat often and have a voice, says Copyblogger’s Sonia Simone.

Phrases that equal no pay – My favorite: “…so there isn’t any pay at the moment, but once we get up and running, we promise to pay.” Oh really – wonder if the electric company will go for that.

Measuring success as a freelancer – Not written specifically for freelance writers, but the lessons apply. Techie blogger Dawn Foster says: “Pick the top three to five items that determine success and focus on those items as the primary…metrics.”

The art of writing status updates – USA Today story on how to write for maximum appeal on Twitter and Facebook.

10 tools to organize your tweeps – Software apps to keep track of you who’re following on Twitter – good for separating sources, friends, editors, etc.

Here’s what I’ve been reading this week:

• The Editor Unleashed The Editor Unleashed Guide to Good Blogging - Good advice from the former editor of Writer’s Digest.
• The Huffington Post 13 tips for actually getting some writing done
• The Urban Muse I Said, He Said, We Said – Picking a point of view for your website.
• Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist Conflict of interest doesn’t apply to blogs (another reason newspapers are dead)
• Erik Sherman’s WriterBiz 6 lessons from using Twitter
• Blog Salad How to throw a Twitter party – Exceedingly detailed (and simple) instructions for using Twitter hashtags for “a conference, or a live guest lecture series, or just an exclusive conversation with a certain group or certain topic in mind.”
• Seth’s Blog Saying ‘no’ – To remind ourselves that sometimes turning down an assignment is the right thing to do.
• Bike with Jackie Embrace your supporters – Using social networks to give as much as you get.

Here’s what I’ve been reading about freelancing, writing and the online news business I’ve been reading this week:

On writing:

• How do you learn to write – From a literary agent, writer and book editor.
• 5 tips for citizen journalism from ProPublica’s new ‘crowdsorcerer’
• 16 things you learn in j-school – Journalism basics
• You don’t have to be a journalist to be a journalist – Advice from a young journalist.
• The end of newspapers, in chart form – Newspaper classified ads fall off the deep end.

On blogging and online media:

• WordPress tutorials on YouTube – How to move a blog from one domain name to another and more.
• Why ebooks look so ugly
• 55 extremely useful online generators for designers

On Twitter:

• 10 must-have productivity tools for Twitter – The usual suspects (TweetDeck, TwitPics) and more.
• A directory of book trade people on Twitter – Publishers, agents, publicists, booksellers, etc.
• Twitter in the newsroom – Podcast of print and broadcast journalists talking about using Twitter.