Newspapers do not only carry the role of spreading news nation or worldwide but also serve as an educational tool in foreign language contexts subsidiarily. Consisting of as few words as possible yet to define a lot of ideas, newspaper headlines were considered to form a fruitful base for promoting reading and writing skills of pre-service EFL teachers. With this thought in mind, a news story prediction activity was implemented with 45 pre-service teachers at the English Language Teaching (ELT) Department of a state university in Turkey. Completed through two semesters (20 weeks), this study required the participants to keep newspaper portfolios in which they put a) the news story that they found, b) their written prediction based on the headline before reading the content, and c) written comparison of their prediction with the original news story focusing on matching and/or mismatching points of their guesses after reading the news story. The researcher assessed students' performance by giving them two headlines at the end of each semester. In addition, a questionnaire was distributed to the students to gather their thoughts about reading and writing skills improvement and also the appreciation of the utilized technique. Together with the portfolio process evaluation and a final interview, this study underpins the contribution of newspaper headlines for facilitating the reading and writing skills of pre-service teachers of EFL.