For politicians and journalists, spin is the word of our times. Politicians do it incessantly, the media attempt to detect and deflect it incessantly.
So where does the idea of spin sit alongside the idea of quality journalism? They are, surely, natural enemies.
Which creates a puzzle. Why did Fairfax Media — arguably the home of the best quality journalism in Australian history — this week employ one of the country’s top “spinners”, Sue Cato, to help massage its communication with its own quality journalists?
Surely the home of spin detection is the last place you would expect to find the wet fingerprints of spin itself.
Or has the definition of quality journalism changed so much that its practitioners now regard spin as one of its natural elements?
Interesting question in the abstract. But from a quick review of the changes Cato made to Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood’s memo to staff which was interestingly published in yesterday’s Crikey, I thought Cato’s version was a considerable improvement on Hywood’s draft. Maybe she’s just a better writer than Hywood.
“Quality (mainstream? Australia?) journalism”? Please explain?
You write as if a majority of “journalists” (preoccupied with “spinning for Sun king and coalition”) see “spin” as anathema (to their goals), rather than their anthem, nowadays?
Read all about it (they’ve got to eat too).
They’re “spinning’s” out of control – the brake is broke (on the treadle).
(“First Dog”? Full?)
This is a tabloid-style over simplification. All organisations have messages they want to get out to the world, and issues on which they are expected to issue public statements.
For a public company like Fairfax, it is an ASX requirement that they keep the market informed of significant events.
Companies, governments and organisations are entitled to communicate with the world, without it being seen as something sinister. (In fact it’s far more sinister if they don’t communicate.) And they are entitled to hire communications practitioners to help them do that. It doesn’t matter if these practitioners are in-house or external.
All writers / journalists need editors. There is nothing at all noteworthy in the fact that Hywood’s copy in this instance has been edited by a communications expert.
I’d regard politicians and journalists as equal spinners.
But the communication in question is Hywood’s internal memo to his own staff. The whole point of this anonymous editorial is that while a chief executive’s statement to the public might be rewritten by a communications expert, it seems gratuitous if not anomalous that Hywood, himself a former journalist, should need a communications consultant to communicate to other journalists.