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.