On the point of setting a "writing style" I'm not so sure what to do or what to aim for, but I know that we need to. At the moment, we're posting something once every 2 weeks, and as such it has to be rather substantial. At the current time we don't intend to be entirely journalistic (and report on music news), because we'd end up writing about events that happened 2 weeks ago, and wouldn't be able to reuse old unpublished articles (not to mention the competition from hundreds of well-established "niche" online music magazines).
We also have to factor in that Waffles is a general music site, but users have very wide-ranging tastes. There are people that like Jazz, Rock, IDM, World, Ambience, Classical, Pop so we don't really have a particular 'niche' on which to write for.
To a lot of people that are interested in writing for us, what's important is that the articles differentiate themselves from the what you might get on Wikipedia (and elsewhere).
Lots of people have therefore written opinion pieces. I think I'll try and get everybody to read this (http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/%7Ealeigh/pdf/OpEd_Tips.pdf) to start with at least, since from what I read it seemed like pretty good advice.
I definitely agree that I should strongly recommend that people base their articles on recent events, or coming events (like writing about an artist who is about to release a new album etc...). This would make any article feel a lot more current, and people are more likely to read it.
Of course, I still think that it'd be nice to get say a story-like review of a concert, or an artist/genre history - but I guess that's hard to do well.
Sticking too rigorously to a very formal style guide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_guide) such as used by a professional paper would obviously be overkill for us (although the link was an interesting read). Perhaps, I or somebody else should write some general guidelines on how, and on what the articles should be written.
Thoughts?