WordCount weekly online news roundup for April 3

This week’s highlights from the freelance and digital news biz:

HuffPost invests in investigative news – Everybody’s favorite we-don’t-pay-contributors news aggregator Website is turning over a new leaf, big time. The The Huffington Post is launching an investigative news team with a $1.75 million starter budget and advice from well-known online news guru and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. The Huffington Post Investigative Fund will make its work available “for any publication or Website to publish at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post,” Rosen says.

DIY publishing – Magazine you used to write for folded? Why not start your own. Computer giant HP has a new service called MagCloud that lets an indie publisher email .pdf files it will print on the same type of glossy stock high-end magazine use for only 20 cent a page, using outsourcers to do that actual printing and distribution. This New York Times article calls the service “publishing’s equivalent to YouTube.”

Twitter media database – With Twitter growing a reported 30 percent a month, new tools are popping up all the time to help find what or who you’re looking for on the service. One of the newest is a sharable database of freelancers and other writers on Twitter. If you’re not on it already, add your name here.

Portland TV personalities on Twitter – Oregon Media Insiders blogger Lynn Siprelle names names in this rundown of which local TV stations rock Twitter and which don’t.

Nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks that – Portland’s best-known punk cabaret singer and entertainer extraordinaire Storm Large opened her one-woman show, “Crazy Enough,” this week. The former reality TV star (the long-since cancelled Rockstar: Supernova) opened up about the show, her life and her creative process in a story and Q&A in today’s Oregonian. On writing, Large says: “Most of the time it’s miserable and you’re just thinking, ‘This sucks! No one’s gonna like this!'”

WordCount Live and in Person – I’ll be talking about the different ways small businesses are using social media as part of a panel discussion at Shop Symposium/09, on Monday, April 6, at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. If you’re going, be sure to track me down and say hi.