The week’s highlights from the freelance world and digital media business:

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.

Portland bloggers who use WordPress are set to gather for the city’s first WordPress user group meeting on Thursday, Jan. 15, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. The meeting takes place at CubeSpace, the inner S.E. Portland workspace community for writers, programmers and other independently employed people.

According to the organizers, the meeting will cover:

• Getting the user group started
• Monthly meeting times and dates
• Ideas for future meeting topics or speakers
• New features in WordPress 2.7, the latest version of the blogging software that debuted on Dec. 10

As of Jan. 7, approximately 40 people had signed up to attend the meeting or expressed an interest in going.

Find out more details or RSVP for the meeting here. CubeSpace is located at 622 SE Grand Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97214. Contact them at (503) 206-3500 or info@CubeSpacePDX.com.

Bad news continues for news companies. Tribune Co. filed for Chapter 11 federal bankruptcy protection, freezing deferred compensation payments to former employees and making it uncertain whether freelancers with unpaid invoices will get their money from the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

Listener-supported radio news hasn’t escaped the current downturn. This week National Public Radio announced it will lay off 64 people and cancel two shows, “Day to Day” and “News and Notes.”

It’s not good times for the economy. But it’s good times for people who write about it. In the week of Dec. 1-7, two-thirds of coverage tracked by the the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism weekly news coverage index was devoted to the economy – the financial crisis, the Obama administration’s plans for dealing with it and attempts to bail out the auto industry.

Time picks the best magazine covers of 2008. No. 1 is The New Yorker’s Nov. 17 cover showing a moonlit “O” shining over the Lincoln Memorial. My personal favorite is Los Angeles magazine’s cover tribute to the city’s best high schools, rendered completely in ball-point pen doodles.

WordPress rolls out its annual winter fun feature – make snow fall over your blog posts.

Change is in the wind. It’s a new season, we’re about to get a new president, and it’s time for WordCount to get a face lift.

Starting this week, I’ve switched to a cleaner, more traditional design with black type on a white background. It’s got a newspaper feel to it that should make it easier to read. For those of you who read WordCount via your RSS feed, check it out at michellerafter.wordpress.com. The design is based on WordPress’ Journalist v1.9 theme, which debuted recently.

I’ve also added a paged called About WordCount to explain the mission of the blog, and made a few other changes.

If you like WordPress, you’ll be interested in hearing that Automattic is getting ready to launch a new version of the popular blogging software. The expected release date is Nov. 10. According to Lorelle on WordPress, expect to see a new Administration panel interface, Comments panel overhaul and lots more.

Here in Portland, WordPress users are gathering to celebrate the event. The organizers of the recent WordCamp Portland conference are holding a WordPress 2.7 release party on Nov. 10 at Cubespace, the shared workspace on S.E. Grand. Read more about the event here.

If you’re a freelance writer, do you need a Website and a blog?

A lot of freelancers I know have both. A Website can be a great showcase for a freelancer’s resume, writing samples and clips, photographs (if they take them), references, recommendations and other marketing materials an editor or book publisher might want to see. But Websites can be time-consuming, intimidating and expensive to create.

A blog is a great medium for a writer to practice their craft. Thanks to blogging sites such as WordPress, TypePad and Blogger.com, getting a blog started can be easy and cheap. But most blogs are set up so new material goes on the front page in reverse chronological order. So if a writer is using a blog as her Website for marketing purposes, editors have to wade through all those blog posts to get to what they really want.

That works for some people, including me. However, I just stumbled upon a post that explains how to put a static front page on a WordPress blog, which means if you want, you can make your blog look like a traditional Website. Thanks to fellow freelancer Carolyn Erickson for bringing it to my attention, and especially to the owner of the Blogging Experiment site for sharing the information, which includes step-by-step instructions.

You can read the instructions here.