Let's face it, all'folk' songs were contempory at some time or other i.e. all the Napoleonic ballads, General Wolf etc. The fact that they were 'collected' years & years after the events desxcribed makes them 'traditional'but if some unknown writer wrote a song about,lets say, the death of Jade Goodey [as aposed to the Death of Queen Jane] & some collector heard it being sung in 20 years time, would that make it 'traditional'?
Besides writing, as I would put it,'within the folk idiom' my main interest is sea songs. During my time in the MN I noted down, all the shipboard songs I heard, & no I don't mean chanties, they were long gone, no one knew who wrote them, their were scores of varients of many of these songs [see Perma Thread 'Merchant Navy Songs]. All of them were 20th C songs, does this make them 'traditional' or 'folk' or just 'songs'? In the main they use existing tunes, a few of them folk tunes, but mainly popular song tunes e.g. Bye bye blackbird.
I don't rearly care, I love traditional songs with a passion, but also contemporary 'folk' songs if they stike a chord with me.