You seem to have confused the word "news" with the word "journalism" (def'n 3). "Did you hear the news? I got engaged!"

news: "1. New information of interest" or "2. Reports of current events broadcast via media such as newspapers or television". Clearly this isn't a TV station nor a newspaper. IMO, it isn't much like either of those. So I say we go with def'n 1.

[Full disclosure, I was not involved in the production of the Wiktionary page defining "news", nor did I consult it nor any other source as to the definition of "news" when I wrote that I thought the important characteristic here should be for it to be "interesting". So the suspiciously strong correlation to the definition's "of interest" is merely suspicious. And, yes, Wiktionary was the first (and only) resource I subsequently checked.]

Further, the individual words used to describe in section titles here have repeatedly been shown to not be of paramount importance to the purpose of the sections (usually when somebody focuses on one such word too intently).

In the case of Perl News, I think the purpose of the section has been trying to find itself and the site documentation has not really declared that discovery a success yet. So my comments are based on what I see the section being used for, how I see others (to some small extent) approving and disapproving of said uses, and what I think would work well.

Certainly, an interesting release announcement (that shares insights) could be placed in Meditations. But, given that the (usually rather uninteresting, usually even "dry") release announcements for Perl itself usually end up in Perl News and that release announcements are very much "time based", I like the idea of things that are primarily release announcements being put into Perl News for the small gain in consistency. A node that is primarily sharing insights but that also, secondarily, includes the announcement of a release, I would somewhat prefer to end up in Meditations.

I certainly agree with you that it would be inappropriate (rather pointless) for a release announcement that contains no more than what is provided by http://search.cpan.org/recent (the name, version number, module "tag line", and author (encoded in the URLs)) to be posted to Perl News. The more interesting the additional material included, the less inappropriate it becomes.

And I agree that posting for the sole purpose of self-promotion is a bad idea (such a bad idea that it doesn't happen much).

But I don't want to try to require the practicing of journalism nor require that something be "of sufficient interest to the public or a special audience to warrant press attention or coverage" (newsworthy -- the wikt:// def'n frankly sucked).

In definition #1, the "of interest" is just as key as "new information" is.

My concern isn't with the section's use varying or topics meandering. It's purely about noise. A quality write-up, even from an author, about something that's actually interesting would be welcome in my eyes.

As a concrete example, since merlyn's article archive is really useful and often cited and he was the one most likely to know where it moved, I'm really glad he told us where to find it. The quality of the resource had already been established, and the news was that it was moving. It reminds me of all the trouble people went through to find another big archive of knowledge recently and put a copy on the Monastery for posterity.

My concern with the slow-moving section being used for self-promotion isn't because I think self-promotion is evil or because I think a module author or article author is necessarily incapable of posting a good article about his or her own work. It's because people tend to be very poor judges of their own work's importance, especially before they get feedback. If young projects few care about start getting regular root node coverage in Perl News, then the nodes I'm looking for in that section become less of the whole. The site and especially that section become less useful to me. Call me Barney Fife, but it's one weed I'd like to nip in the bud.

The whole issue with the label of "news" is that it connotes that something is objectively reported.

No, "news" refers to descriptions of events. I believe that releases of modules do not qualify, depending on how important the change to a module is to how we use Perl. The identity of the person doing what you're complaining about -- conflating "Perl News" with "CPAN activity" -- does not enter into this judgement, in my opinion. I would not recommend being frightened by self-promotion, rather than by lack of participation or ability to parse the names of the sections of sites such as this.