A Chapter Closed in Southern Gospel

A Chapter Closed in Southern Gospel May 2, 2014

My erstwhile blogging colleague Daniel Mount has decided to close down his site Southern Gospel Journal (formerly Southern Gospel Blog), citing a lessening need for a news site with the rise of social media and a desire to meet some other personal goals, like honing his songwriting craft:

For my entire adult life, writing a post every morning has been the only routine I have known. So this decision was certainly influenced by a number of factors.
Perhaps most significant is how the world has changed over the last eight years. In 2006, we needed news websites. Now, we follow our favorite artists directly on Facebook or Twitter. That has decreased the need for this site. But I truly don’t regret it, because it is better for the genre.
Something similar happened with CD reviews. Thanks to Spotify, we don’t need a reviewer to tell us if a CD is any good when we can hear it for ourselves.

This is a great disappointment to those of us who used Daniel as our one-stop spot to catch up on what was happening in Southern Gospel music, because it was too cumbersome to check everyone’s twitter feeds/recent Youtube uploads for ourselves. It’s especially disappointing for folks like me who have stubbornly resisted opening Facebook/Twitter accounts of our own. But I respect his choice, and knowing how passionate and dedicated he is about songwriting, I look forward to hearing him blow us away when the cuts start coming.
I can’t hope to fill his shoes when it comes to exhaustive, up-to-the-minute reports on your favorite artists, but then again, I’ll need to keep up more with those twitters/subscriptions if I’m to know when the next major group turnover happens anyway! So, I will try not to fall asleep at the wheel there. I would also love to do more interviews, as those are always my favorite columns to read on his site, or any site actually. They also seem to be quite popular whenever I run one. So artists, writers, producers… if you’d like to give me a heads-up and a scoop about an upcoming project of yours, shoot me an e-mail. I’d love to give my readers more sneak peeks than I’ve offered in the past. One thing I would like to do more of is pull back the curtain on some of the behind-the-scenes folks in the business, like I did with Rebecca Peck recently. But given how busy their schedules are, we’ll have to see how that pans out!
So, farewell to Daniel, thanks for all your hard work, and we’ll see you around.


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