Standing up for writers – Today is the 2nd Annual Writers Worth Day. Lori Widmer, a Valley Forge, Pa., writer, dreamed up the campaign to help writers and other freelancers do a better job negotiating fees and standing up themselves. I’m down with that. As I’ve said here before, writing for free is not a business model.

Write On! Query contest – The southern California-based Write On! writers’ support group led by veteran freelancer Debra Eckerling is sponsoring a query contest with winners in screenplay, teleplay, fiction and non-fiction categories. First prize in each category is the opportunity to have a literary agent read your query, plus an iScript recording of the project and Save the Cat software.  Second and third prizes will be given in each category too. Entries are due by June 22 and winners will be announced July 7. Visit the website for more details.

Reporters go online, bloggers go to class – Membership in the Online News Association is up by a third this year as more old-school journalists retrain themselves in News 2.0, according to this Poynter Online report. Meanwhile, traditional journalism groups are changing their policies to allow bloggers and citizen journalists working in non-traditional media outlets to become members or take part in conventions and seminars.

Micropayments anyone? The Wall Street Journal will introduce a micropayment system this fall for individual articles and premium subscribes to its website, according to this Reuters piece. Good thing it’s the WSJ doing the experimenting. According to PaidContent.org, a new study on what news readers will pay for says beyond financial info, it ain’t much.

2009 Loeb Award finalists announced – UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Gerald Loeb Awards are awarded to the year’s best business news stories. Winners will be announced June 29. The bad economy, real estate industry meltdown and collapse of prestigious Wall Street firms figured heavily in this year’s competition.

Emailing in your blog posts – WordPress bloggers can now post new material to their blogs via email. The blogging software company rolled out a new feature this week that lets people post new material from an iPhone, Microsoft Outlook or anywhere else you can send email.

Twitter tools for journalists and writers:

• Tinker - This app claims to let you follow events people are talking about on Twitter or Facebook.
• 7 tips on using hash tags – From Erik Sherman’s WriterBiz blog.

Why should writers care? For one thing, Google claims that Chrome does a better job than existing browsers like Internet Explorer or Firefox when it comes to searching for multimedia content online.

But the bigger deal might be that Chrome will give everyone, including writers, more tools to choose from for the online work they do.

The good news is there are already lots of early reviews of Chrome, some of which I’ll list here. The bad news is Chrome doesn’t work with Macs yet but is reported to be “coming soon.”

If you’re thinking of giving Chrome a spin, read these reviews first:

Wall Street Journal: First test of Google’s new browser – “Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that….will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version….is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later.”

PC World: Google Chrome Web Browser Review – “Chrome lives up to its hype.”

VentureBeat: Chrome more than capable of taking on IE and Firefox – “Add Web browsers to the list of things Google does well.”

According to published reports like this one, the Wall Street Journal’s new luxury glossy – the working title is Pursuits – has already lined up advertisers and a tentative 2009 launch date. Mansueto Ventures originally set a May 2008 launch date for Upstart, a quarterly for startups,though according to this Mediaweek report, the date is now “undetermined.”

If the economy’s still OK, I predict they’ll get the advertising base they need to greenlight their respective ventures. But if we’re in a recession, don’t be surprised if these companies hold off a while longer, or scrap plans altogether.

More details:

• The Wall Street Journal’s new venture will be a high-end glossy quarterly for the super rich. The editor is Tina Gaudoin, a lifestyle editor and columnist for the Times of London who became editor of that paper’s high-end glossy, Luxx, last June. Gaudoin came under fire this week after a Columbia Journalism Review story questioned her journalistic ethics for quoting a business partner in a Times column and failing to disclose the relationship.
• In addition to UpStart, Mansueto is starting FastCompany.tv, an online TV network covering the tech scene with interviews, reviews and news on “the latest technology products, and lifestyle programming.”
• IDG, publisher of PC World, Computerworld, CIO and other tech titles, is preparing to relaunch The Industry Standard, the former Internet trade that died along with the rest of the dot-com business back in 2001. IDG was a majority stakeholder of The Standard and acquired the magazine’s remaining assets after it went bankrupt. Now IDG plans to relaunch The Standard as an online-only publication and is searching for an editor in chief. The company’s posted the position on an IDG careers page that’s accessible only to people who register at the site.
• Meanwhile, The Industry Standard’s former editor in chief Jonathan Weber is busy with his own plans to spin off a print magazine from NewWest.net, the regional daily news site he started after leaving Silicon Valley for Missoula, Montana. Weber weighed in on the print v. online media debate earlier this month in this guest editorial in the Times of London’s TimesOnline.com.

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.