The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson suggests a tweaking of what is defined as "news."

From the commentary: (firewalled for non-Globe subscribers)

Defining “news” is a tricky business, given readers' tastes. Editors and writers, after all, must cater to these tastes or they will be out of business. With severe pressures on the newspaper business, those possibilities are not idle matters.

Everyone in the business is re-examining what is being done and how. Yet, there are many truisms about what constitutes “news” that no one ever questions.

Consider two of the truisms: crime sells, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict ought to get maximum exposure. ...

He went on to give the example of the good-news story about crime being at a 25-year low being buried in the Globe. Beyond that, however, he said the real story was figuring out why.

On the Israel-Palestinian issue, Simpson said too much attention is given to minor developments, and the phrase "historic opportunity" is thrown around much too easily.

The most consequential story of our time is the intellectual ferment and clashes within Islamic civilization, a few of which influence the Palestinian-Israeli saga but most of which reach far beyond it geographically, politically and economically. That story is much harder to write – like explaining why crime rates are falling. It runs completely counter to prevailing definitions of what qualifies as “news.”

Maybe – but this is a heresy – if we adjusted our definition of “news,” instead of ritualistically serving up the predictable and not terribly consequential, a few more consumers might be interested. They would certainly be better informed.

I find reasons to both agree and disagree with Simpson's column..

First, let's start with a definition of news from my tattered old Oxford Concise Dictionary:

Information about important or interesting recent events, esp. when published or broadcast.

From my time in the news business, what really drives interest is events. When a truly important and interesting event is happening, people read that, from what I can see of various tools like top stories, most emailed and whatnot.* When there isn't a major event that catches peoples' attention, they fall back on the merely interesting -- or, worse yet, entertaining (click on this and this to see what I mean).

* When I worked at Bell Globemedia Interactive, there was only one period where it was impossible to get a newspaper by the time I dragged my lazy ass into work. That brief period started Sept. 12, 2001.

I don't think Simpson would disagree with me on that point. What I think he's getting at is that we bore people when we treat something as news just because it happened and we considered it news before. Many developments in some issues are so incremental that they simply won't be of interest to a wide audience.

Where I would differ with him is treating analysis as a substitute for news.

Personally, I would love to see a great article explaining the clashes within Islamic civilization (oddly enough, Simpson wrote a column, published July 19, entitled The conflict within Islam is the conflict of our time). But if something newsworthy in the Islamic world just happened and I have a fixed amount of time, I'll skip the analysis.*

* On the home page of globeandmail.com as I updated this post early Saturday afternoon is this story: Palestinians drop policy of 'armed resistance'. Call me crazy, but that's worth reporting.

And how much analysis of  the issue can be done? Simpson also wrote this column -- Can Islam co-exist with itself? ... on July 22, 2006.

Simpson has written two columns over the space of a year on what he has identified as one the most consequential issues of our time.

Mind you, his title is national affairs columnist, not clash-within-Islamic-civilization columnist. Simpson has a lot of waterfront to cover. Even within the Globe, however, do a search on "Islamic civilization" and see what pops up. The ratio of opinon/analysis to news stories is relatively light, and the Globe offers up a healthy serving of opinion/analysis on a six-days-per-week basis.

I don't fault the Globe for that. News, for better or worse, will always be driven by events. The trick for news organizations of all types is to give the proper weight to those developments. Newspapers still are best positioned to put those events into some type of context, to explain the "why" of those happenings.

While I sympathize with Simpson's view that getting to the real heart of matters -- and not simply being mindlessly reactive and captive to the flow of events; in other words, doing journalism -- is something that news organizations should strive for, "news" will always primarily about things that have happened.