Some issues I'm finding that will require some additional help:
In order for other pages to pick up the local CSS file with specific portlet styles, I had to hard-code the link element. This file should be loaded within the portlet (similar to viewNews.jsp) but it's not;
editNews.jsp - should the form at the bottom of the page have a submit button? There were form elements but they were not wrapped in a form block. I added one for styling, and added a submit button (if the changes are captured during page navigation, we should at least have a submit button for users to press - we always feel better when we click a button to make changes, even if it's not necessary).
editNewsDefinition.jsp - jQuery drives a lot of the styles, which will need to be re-written to let Bootstrap drive the styles and jQuery drives the functionality. This was not completed in this pull request.
Some work has been done with this but has not been merged into master:
https://github.com/mbelmok01/NewsReaderPortlet
Take fork and finish UI updates, then create a pull request back to master.