So she gamed the system.

Williamson, a Los Angeles freelancer with clips from big name publications like the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly and Sunset magazine, wrote a series of Examiner.com pieces that she admits included exaggerations and half-truths, like this one about the dangers of playing tag. She explains the whole thing in an email she sent to Fishbowl LA, the Mediabistro blog on the Los Angeles media business.

Nothing happened. No phone calls from fact checkers. No emails from editors questioning her sources. Nothing, that is, until Williamson went a little too far and wrote an autism-related story about Jenny McCarthy the actress and alternative treatment advocate noticed and had her lawyers follow up.

In no time, Examiner pulled the stories and fired Williamson, although she argues since she hadn’t gotten a dime from the site it wasn’t really getting fired.

Williamson says she wrote the stories as an experiment to call out the shortcomings of content aggregators, Examiner.com in particular. In a comment on the Fishbowl LA story, Examiner.com’s editorial director Travis Henry says the site has a growing editorial staff that works with writers, providing them with coaching and daily training sessions.

Here at WordCount, there’s been a similar exchange of opinions on the value of writing for content aggregators recently. In a post and multiple follow up comments, a Helium representative explained the site’s editorial process and how much money writers can make. Several freelancers countered her with arguments explaining why they won’t write for content aggregators or why they did and wouldn’t again. I even chimed in with my own advice to write for a hyperlocal news site instead.

While newspapers and magazines figure out how to transform themselves into fiscally sound Internet businesses, the pay-per-click business model that content aggregators – my friend and fellow freelancer Heather Boerner calls them content aggravators -  use to compensate writerscitizen journalists isn’t going away. Whether it will become the predominant online publishing business model in the future is hard to say. But it’s safe to assume the arguments over the merits of working for content aggregators will continue.

Opportunities haven’t dried up completely, you just have to know where to look. For example, a freelance writer I know just landed a deal to write a regular adventure travel column for a major daily newspaper. Other papers are upping their spending for online and multimedia projects, a potential boon for freelancers who are as good with a camcorder as they are with a keyboard.

The same holds for magazines. While some consumer magazines are getting thinner by the month, others are holding steady, and some publishers are even launching new publications. The same thing’s happening in the trades. While many b-to-b or trade magazines have seen drops in ad pages or revenue or both from this time last year, business magazines in some industries are doing OK, and some are showing strong improvements from 2007.

A smart freelancer needs to keep tabs on all that. But how?

Actually, that’s easy. Thanks to some ambitious news hounds, you can read a couple blogs on a regular basis and keep tabs on who’s out, who’s in, what’s launched, what’s died, what’s hot, what’s not – the zeitgeist of the whole media business. My favorites:

Romenesko – Far and away, the most comprehensive blog for capturing the daily drama that is the U.S. newspaper business. Yes, you can go to Poynter Online and read it, but it’s even better to subscribe and find it, like a little gem hiding in your otherwise boring email inbox.

Mr. Magazine – What Romenesko is to newspapers, Samir Husni, aka “Mr. Magazine” is to magazine. Husni is the chair of the University of Mississippi Journalism Department. He’s also the brains behind the annual listing of most notable magazine launches, which he writes about in his Mr. Magazine blog. His pick for most notable launch in 2007: Conde Nast Portfolio.

Mediabistro’s Revolving Door – Mediabistro, the online support system for journalists (job listings, classes, forums, etc.), delivers this tasty dish of industry comings and goings twice a week. Read it at the Website, or register – it’s free- and have it delivered.

Magazine Health Watch – If numbers are your thing, this is your kind of place. This database of information on ad pages and revenue in consumer and business publications is updated daily by Inquiry Management Systems, a publishing service company. The interactive database lets you slice and dice listings any number of ways, handy if you’re interested in finding out which magazine categories are on the rise. Did you know that ad pages for sales management magazines (there are 11) rose 21 percent in the first quarter of 2008 compared with the same period the previous year?

Got your own favorite Website or blog for keeping tabs on the news business? Leave it in a comment and I’ll post it here.