Best of WordCount: Oregon edition

Michelle V. Rafter — Sat, 16 May 2009 13:00:12 +0000

I live and work in Portland, Oregon, and this weekend’s Best of WordCount is dedicated to the area’s burgeoning media community:

Can the techies save the news? – If the scene at the recent BarCampPortland III meet up was any indication, that could very well be the case.
The Smalltown News – Small newspapers are in a better shape than big ones to survive the recession and changing news business, according to this story I did for Oregon Business magazine.
Room to write – No office space at home but hate working in coffee shops? Portland’s got plenty of communal workspaces for writers, part of a nationwide trend of shared workplaces.
WordPress user group forms - The more writers take to blogging, the more call there is for places they can go for training, and this group is one of them.
Portland is for word lovers – It only follows that the city with the country’s best independent book store and most active public library system would host a rockin’ annual book festival. Wordstock is it.
City debates whether bloggers are reporters – In a scene that’s starting to repeat itself across the country, the Portland suburb of Lake Oswego debates whether to allow a local blogger into city meetings.
While other papers sink, the Oregonian swims – I wrote this before the paper’s latest rounds of job cuts and salary reductions. But Portland’s daily is still publishing seven days a week, isn’t in bankruptcy and has managed to keep some of the country’s top feature writers and sports columnists – these days, that’s saying a lot.

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