I actually stopped reading daily newspapers about two years ago. You can get the 'necessary' (differs for everyone) amount of daily information from the web - faster, cheaper and more relevant due to filtering possibilities.
Thorough analysis is in my opinion still best to be found in a select number of weekly and/or monthly publications. The time span involved leads to less noise making it. Finance & economics is the only exception I know of, notwithstanding The Economist. There are an immense number of really knowledgeable bloggers.
The Economist interviews a lot of experts, all of whom have their own agendas. Which makes perfect sense. A sustainable journalistic organization needs lots of generalists; experts are only rewarded for putting their expertise to work. So the only way to get high-quality information is to absorb some opinion along with it.
Even the economist has opinions and untested assumptions borrowed from the conventional wisdom. They just make a better effort to disclaim their opinions and give the other side a fair hearing, which is probably the most honest approach.
This article is based on some faulty logic, mainly that a story started by a PR pitch is "spin." So if Paypal decides to partner with Bump to make a payment application, and the companies put out a press release, and a writer decides that is interesting, it counts as 'spin' in the study. Same thing if the White House announces something. Of course, journalists rely on press releases to find some of their stories. That doesn't make it spin. Things are much more complicated than that. Spin comes from simply accepting a point of view uncritically and not challenging assertions made by sources quoted in a story. Spin also comes in ways that aren't easily detectable, such as getting in with a source by being an outlet that is generally favorable to it.
Basically, this study doesn't mean anything. For instance, when Facebook decided to change its privacy policy in December it announced it to the press. Many published the changes and questioned their legitimacy and why Facebook was inverting its policy. But according to the study, all of those stores were "spin."
When news-people use the word "spin" it's invariably in the same errand: To blame someone/something else for the fact that they don't do their jobs well.
Spin is your source biting back, and some of the sources are getting quite good at it. The response is to bite harder. Writing process-stories about how this or that was "spinned" is just whining.
Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Crikey and can't tell for sure if this applies to them.
Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Crikey and can't tell for sure if this applies to them.
Not really. Crikey caters to a very limited niche in the Australian market and is subscription only. It has a really strong presence amongst policy makers/politicians etc and is probably the best political newspaper in Australia.
Crikey is not read by the man in the street. To give you an idea, their subscription base is in the thousands (not the tens of thousands) out of a country of about 20 million (so ~ 8 million potential households or so). Those who do subscribe do so because it often has leaks/stories that the main papers don't carry.
It's also not a daily newspaper in the traditional sense, unlike the main newspapers. It's an email sent out around midday. You wouldn't subscribe to it to replace the dead tree that turns up outside your house each day. [1]
When news-people use the word "spin" it's invariably in the same errand: To blame someone/something else for the fact that they don't do their jobs well.
You're making a mistake here in assuming that the business of major newspapers is in producing news. It isn't. It's in producing entertainment. If it contains the veneer of news, all the better. On a mainstream newspaper, the news-people are doing their jobs well [2]; they're filling an advertising catalog with enough interesting looking fluff that people will pay for it and read through it.
[1] Although if you're reading Crikey and reading the mainstream newspaper your main motivation for the latter is potentially only to see what other people are reading.
[2] Yes I'm aware the Internet is killing major newspapers, but that's because there's almost limitless other entertainment out there, for free.
If anyone is interested in a more academic (i.e., behavioral economics / information theory-based) discussion of "spin" or "slanting," I'd recommend this paper by Mullainathan and Shleifer:
Thorough analysis is in my opinion still best to be found in a select number of weekly and/or monthly publications. The time span involved leads to less noise making it. Finance & economics is the only exception I know of, notwithstanding The Economist. There are an immense number of really knowledgeable bloggers.