More and more professional reporters are creating their own websites or blogs to showcase their work. But even if you're a student or citizen journalist, you can use Gmail and Blogger, a free service from Google, to set up an online portfolio of your clips in just minutes.

Signing up for a Blogger account takes just a minute - just hit the "Create a Blog" button. And if you already use Google e-mail, just use your Gmail username and password to log into your account.

And remember, a portfolio that's nothing but a collection of hyperlinks will look boring. Be sure to include plenty of photos and Graphics to create visual interest. You can use the pictures that originally appeared with your article, ones you take yourself, or even royalty-free images from services like Stock.xchng, as long as you observe all applicable copyright laws.

For instance, if you've written an article about the Facebook craze, you might use a stock photo of a person typing at a computer to illustrate it.

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You may have heard the terms "broadsheet" and "tabloid" being thrown around to describe different kinds of newspapers. So what's the difference?

Broadsheet refers to the most common newspaper format, which is typically 11 to 12 inches wide and 20 or more inches long. Many of the nation's most respected newspapers - The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall St. Journal, and so on - are broadsheet papers. Broadsheet papers are usually six columns across.

In the strict technical sense, tabloid refers to a type of newspaper that typically measures 11 X 17 inches, which is smaller and narrower than a broadsheet newspaper. Since tabloids are smaller, their stories tend to be shorter than those found in broadsheets. And while broadsheet readers tend to be upscale suburbanites, tabloid readers are often working class residents of big cities.

Indeed, many city dwellers prefer tabloids because they are easy to carry and read on the subway or bus.

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It seems clear: The future of news is online, and printed newspapers appear headed for extinction.

But the picture isn't that simple. Printed newspapers make less money than they used to, but they're still far more profitable than news websites, and until that changes, papers will be around.

Meanwhile, news organizations, hit hard by the recession, are considering whether to start charging for their online content. And a battle is brewing between publishers that produce news stories and the aggregators who make money by linking to them.

Here you'll find the latest developments on all of this.

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You're probably familiar with the legal battle between the music industry and websites that allow surfers to download music. The music industry charges that some sites allow users to download music without paying for it, thus depriving musicians and record companies of royalties.

There's a somewhat similar fight going on between news websites and the so-called aggregators. Aggregators gather headlines and snippets of news stories from news websites, then put links to those stories on their own sites. Aggregators can be search engines, like Google News, or websites such as The Huffington Post.

But news websites increasingly complain that the aggregators make lots of money, in the form of ad revenue, off of the news stories they link to, but don't share those revenues with the news sites that actually produce those stories.

That's a form of theft, say many in the news business.

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Newspaper publishers have long complained that Google rakes in mountains of cash by indexing news stories. Now, in a conciliatory gesture, Google is allowing publishers to set a daily cap on how many articles readers can access for free through the search engine.

In a post on Google's official blog, the company said it will let publishers limit readers to five free articles per day while still allowing news stories to appear in search results.

The move came the same day that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, speaking at a government seminar on the future of journalism, blasted aggregators for "feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others."

Murdoch and other media execs say aggregators like Google make money, in the form of ad revenue, by posting snippets and links to news stories, while the news outlets that actually produce those stories get nothing.

Murdoch has threatened to block Google from displaying his company's articles and is mulling the idea of giving Bing, a Google competitor, exclusive access to News Corp. news content. Many other news sites are considering charging subscription fees for their web content.

Google claims it helps news outlets by sending web surfers to their sites. But Tuesday's announcement is clearly meant to show that the world's most popular search engine wants to be friend, not foe, to newspapers and online news sites.

The move represents a change to Google's "first click free" system, which lets web surfers users find and read articles blocked by subscription paywalls. Under the change, news sites will be able to limit Google users to a maximum of five pages of free content per day unless they subscribe or register.

Anyone concerned about the survival of newspapers should read Rick Edmonds' testimony to the Federal Trade Commission.

Edmonds, the Poynter Institute's business analyst, spoke Tuesday as part of the FTC's workshop on the future of journalism. And while speeches from Rupert Murdoch and Arianna Huffington may have gotten more media attention, no one summarized the challenges facing print journalism as succinctly.

Here are some of Edmonds' main points:

• Widespread newsroom layoffs have already diminished coverage, particularly in areas such as science, arts and suburban news. Websites meant to pick up the slack have filled only part of the void.
• More layoffs are coming, but the more papers cut staff, the less content they have to offer their readers, who can go elsewhere for news.
• Many newspaper companies, particularly those that own large metro papers, are burdened by debt and being bought out by private equity firms with zero news experience. Whether such firms will be good stewards of the papers they purchase is anybody's guess.

But the news isn't all bad. Edmonds outlines some positive developments:

• Newspapers are successfully raising their newsstand prices, making them less reliant on advertising revenue, which plunged during the recession.
• Ad revenue should rise as the economy gains strength. How much is unclear.
• Charging for online content may provide a new source of revenue.

Edmonds paints a gloomy but not despairing picture of the print journalism landscape. Newspapers will probably never regain the dominance they once enjoyed, but going forward he says they should retain a critical role in an ever-more diverse media environment.

Let's hope he's right.

Photo by Tony Rogers

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News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and HuffingtonPost founder Arianna Huffington duked it out Tuesday at a workshop on the future of journalism, with Murdoch arguing that news outlets must charge for online content and Huffington proclaiming that online news is destined to be free.

Who's right? Murdoch.

Sure, it would be a wonderful world - and a real utopia for news junkies - if online news sites could remain free, but they can't. Why not? Because as Murdoch pointed out at the workshop (held by the Federal Trade Commission), news isn't free.

In fact, it costs money - and lots of it - to do high-quality newsgathering. And the journalists who gather news can't work for nothing, not as long as they need food, clothing and shelter like the rest of us.

(I imagine Huffington isn't very familiar with the idea of actually paying journalists. Much of the content on HuffPo is either aggregated from other news sites that do pay their reporters, or comes from celebrity bloggers who earn their incomes elsewhere.)

Murdoch, who has said all News Corp. websites will soon charge for content, took aggregators like HuffPo to task, accusing them of nothing less than theft.

"These people are not investing in journalism," he said. "They're feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others."

If anyone should doubt him, a study released Tuesday by the Fair Syndication Consortium details just how extensive the theft of online news content is. It found that in one month, more than 75,000 unlicensed websites had reused content from U.S. newspapers, including 112,000 near-exact copies of articles.

Huffington, who's good at spouting witty one-liners, ridiculed attempts to charge for online news, saying, "We can't use an analog map to try to find solutions for a digital world."

That sounds kinda clever and hip, but like most one-liners it doesn't mean much. Nor does it speak to the central problem, which is this: Online ad revenue just isn't enough to support a news organization of any size.

Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton, speaking Tuesday at the World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, noted this very problem.

A decade ago, he said, "it was taken for granted that websites supported by advertising were the future." Today, he added, free news sites and online newspapers have one thing in common: "Virtually none is making any money."

Hinton said newspapers made the mistake of giving away their web content because "they were taken in by the game-changing gospel of the Internet age. It was a new dawn, we were told... And we just didn't get it. Like an over-eager middle-aged dad, desperate to look cool, we ended up dancing obediently to other people's tunes."

Read The Era of Free News on the Web Is Ending.

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A supermarket tabloid story claiming that golfing great Tiger Woods had cheated on his wife has put the mainstream media in a tricky spot.

Normally, mainstream news orgs steer clear of the kind of celebrity scandal stories served up by the likes of the National Enquirer, which reported last week that Woods was having an affair with New York night club hostess Rachel Uchitel.

Then, just days later, came Woods' SUV crash outside his Florida home, when he ran over a fire hydrant and smashed into a tree in a neighbor's yard.

Early news reports about the incident raised more questions than they answered: Where was Woods going at 2:30 a.m? How did he crash just pulling out of his own driveway? And did his wife, Elin Nordegren Woods, really smash the SUV's rear window in an effort to save him, as Woods has claimed?

Friday's crash appears to have opened the floodgates for the MSM to at least mention the National Enquirer report. As About.com Golf Guide Brent Kelley has noted, The Associated Press, in a story published Saturday, included the following:

The accident came two days after the National Enquirer published a story alleging that Woods had been seeing a New York night club hostess, and that they recently were together in Melbourne, where Woods competed in the Australian Masters.

The woman, Rachel Uchitel, denied having an affair with Woods when contacted by the AP.

By Monday, the affair allegations had been reported by news outlets worldwide, including Newsday, CBS News, The Guardian, the Toronto Star, and the Telegraph.

Once upon a time, "respectable" news outlets could pretty much ignore what appeared in the supermarket tabs.

Then came the Internet, with its endless proliferation of blogs and websites that repeated any story, anytime, whether it was backed up by actual facts or not (see my profile of the Drudge Report).

And the National Enquirer started getting some stories right, and not just about celebrities but about the kind of people - politicians, for example - that mainstream media consider important.

For instance, the Enquirer broke the story of Sen. John Edwards' affair nearly a year before Edwards, John Kerry's running mate in 2004, admitted he had cheated on his wife. Mainstream news orgs were left to play catch-up on a story they had mistakenly ignored.

So how does the MSM decide whether to report stuff dredged up by supermarket tabs? There are no set rules, but there are certain questions editors ask when making this decision:

• Is the story is newsworthy enough?
• Is the person involved important enough?
• Are there extenuating circumstances that make the allegations relevant?
• Has at least one major news organization already reported on the allegations?

In the Tiger Woods case, it's clear that the answer to all these questions is "yes." Woods is not just another celebrity jock - he's quite possibly the greatest golfer who ever lived, an athlete destined to make the history books. Anything that happens to him is going to be deemed newsworthy.

Also, the extenuating circumstances - the mysterious crash and its laundry list of unanswered questions - have made the National Enquirer story relevant. And when the AP - the world's largest and arguably most important news organization - mentioned the Enquirer story, that gave the green light to other news orgs, and the floodgates opened.

What do you think? Should mainstream news outlets mention the National Enquirer allegations in their stories about Tiger Woods' car accident? Why or why not?

Read more about journalistic ethics.

In photo above, Tiger Woods, his daughter, Sam, and wife, Elin Nordegren, stand on the sidelines before a college football game at Stanford Stadium on Nov. 21 in Palo Alto, California.

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There's been no shortage of hyperbolic hyperventilating from pundits, on both the left and the right, over the health care legislation winding its way through Congress. But today's New York Times features an example of some much-needed reporting - not editorializing - on people hit hard by health care costs.

In Nashville, Tenn., far from the power centers where the opinion-mongers operate, reporter Kevin Sack chronicles how an increasing number of people seem to be ending up bankrupt, driven into penury not by lost jobs but by overwhelming medical bills.

Sack does what any enterprising reporter would: He starts his story at the city's "old stone bankruptcy court" where he encounters Jodie and Charlie Mullins. The couple were gettting by on his police officer's salary and had health insurance, but when Jodie developed serious health problems they discovered the policy covered just 80 percent of their costs.

Mr. Mullins tells Sack: "I always promised myself that if I ever got in trouble, I'd work two jobs to get out of it. But it gets to the point where two or three or four jobs wouldn't take care of it. The bills just were out of sight."

Sack doesn't beat readers over the head with the politics of the issue. He admits that statistics on how many people are driven into bankruptcy by medical bills "are elusive," and that a Harvard study on the issue has been criticized as biased.

But he also writes that "there is a general sense among bankruptcy lawyers and court officials, in Nashville as elsewhere, that the share of personal bankruptcies caused by illness is growing."

"This has really become the insurance system for the country," Susan R. Limor, a bankruptcy trustee, tells Sack.

After all the breathless editorializing on cable news channels, Sack's clean, simple prose is a breath of fresh air. And for aspiring journalists, his piece is instructive. Want to find compelling human stories to tell? Start at your local courthouse. Talk to people in bankruptcy court, or housing court, or divorce court. Get average folks to share their stories, and from those tales you may glean larger trends transforming the city, the state or the country.

And leave out the hysteria. We've always got the talking heads on TV for that.

Read more about how to find stories worth writing about.

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