I am on the Journalism Advisory Board of a new company called SpinSpotter, which, like Pajamas TV, is in very early beta. (Pajamas Media is still in beta, in its way, but went to 42 million page views for its aggregated blogs and portal in August!) SpinSpotter is pretty much what its name says – an algorithmic method of detecting journalistic spin.
I’m not going to get into their methodology. You can check out the beta site linked above. But I thought of the new company immediately when staring at the front page of Sunday’s NYT. The first graph of the top left article (on Palin, no surprise) reads like this: Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.
She does? Not spin, is it? Yes, that’s the entire graph and lede. Could be a good test for the SpinSpotter computers. Their servers might crash on that one.
Alternatively, it’s a good lede for Mad or The Onion. (The rest of the article, pushed just a jot, could be from The Onion.) What’s amazing is that it is signed by three reporters (Jo Becker, Peter S. Goodman and Michael Powell). Just how do they do that? Do they all sit down at the computer and knock out the same meretricious opening together? Or do they switch off writing paragraphs? In Hollywood, we joke the more writers the worse the movie. Of course, that’s not completely a joke – it has a strong element of truth. When I see a collection of names on a news article (actually in this case a closet Obama/Biden advertorial), I smell an editorial rat. Someone doesn’t want to take responsibility. Or someone’s taking orders.
Whatever the case, nearly everything is spin, this blog included. The difference is – some of us admit it. The New York Times, pathetically, doesn’t. It will be fun to see the results when folks run SpinSpotter on their front page articles.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member