What is news?
As some of you may have suspected, I posted a fairly routine press release yesterday for a reason. I’ve been wondering what exactly constitutes news, or, more precisely, what makes an item in our genre newsworthy.
The standard press releases–website re-designs, label signings, publicity deals, et cetera–form quite a bit of the news material on some websites. But are they newsworthy? Are they stories relevant to the average Southern Gospel fan, or are they just industry minutiae that only insiders care about?
What should constitute news in the genre, and if we apply that standard, how often does something happen that is truly newsworthy?
I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers. I’m just proposing the question and opening the floor. Sometimes blog posts resolve a dispute or answer a question, but often they are most useful when they start a discussion.
