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I've noticed a disturbing (to me, anyway) trend starting lately in the Perl News section of the site. This isn't CPAN, yet some people seem to think that every module release -- initial or in some cases even update (of theirs, of course) -- deserves a manual entry on the site as a newsworthy development. Isn't this what http://search.cpan.org/recent is meant to be? To my eyes, that makes self-promotion of module authors in Perl News here look redundant (and tacky).

I think self-promotion is fine, but I don't think pushing a press release on everyone for everything you do is a proper way to do it. One can put RFCs in Meditations asking for advice on a module before submitting it to CPAN. One can ask for people to look over it once it's released via private messages, in the chatterbox, or maybe in Meditations. Singling out your module for a thread as news is not self-promotion. It's noise which I must dig through to find the real news. If it makes me think anything about the module's author who posted it as news, it'll make me think less of them rather than more.

I think updating the community on things like a well-known and oft-referenced site moving or changing URLs is news. I think a book release is news, or the launch of a new and useful site about Perl is news. Conferences about Perl, lectures about Perl at wider industry conferences, and releases of transcripts, video, or slides from such talks are newsworthy to me. A link to a great article about Perl or about a program written in Perl somewhere else is news, especially if it isn't in the major Perl community sites (Perl.com, Perl.org, CPAN.org, PerlBuzz, http://perl.oreilly.com, Perl Is Alive). Even a recent jobs available announcement I found newsworthy, not because it was a jobs post, but because the company in question was expanding their rolls by forty Perl programmers. I think in the current economy that's news.

If the release of a module or an update to a module is really newsworthy, then I don't think the author of the module would have to be the one to relay that information from the usual places to the Perl News section of PerlMonks. A very commonly used tool like the DBI, CGI, or XML::Twig modules or the whole Moose, Catalyst, POE, or Padre projects might be written up by some interested third party. If that's the case, it's probably rare and there is probably something actually newsworthy about the new release. Even though such may be newsworthy, I don't see Tim Bunce, Lincoln Stein, or Michel Rodriguez posting every update manually to Perl News for their projects (or themselves and their names).

Am I being crotchety? Never mind that. Am I just being crotchety? Shouldn't the topicality for a news section involve newsworthiness? Isn't that especially the case when the information in question is already available at a well-known automated feed?


In reply to What exactly counts as "Perl News"? by mr_mischief

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