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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Spin Control: Spinning out of control to hunt for nuggets of gold

Jim Camden The Spokesman-Review

Every Monday morning for the last four years, I’ve hurried to my desk in The Spokesman-Review newsroom to see if the mailbox light on the phone was on or the inbox for e-mail had hits. If so, it was usually a sign that one of my two favorite things had happened.

Someone called or wrote to say they liked something in Spin Control.

Someone called or wrote to say what an idiot I was for something in Spin Control.

Truth be told, it didn’t really matter. The fact that people would take time on a Sunday – when everything from family ventures to home projects to Seahawks football were competing for their time – to react to something they read, was special.

Not the “Saturday Night Live” Church Lady “special,” either. A real kind of special, something all tied up with writing something that gets printed on a sheet of paper, getting that sheet of paper to other people, having them pick it up, hold it in their hands, unfold it and read what you wrote.

More than anything else, writers want to be read. Love us or hate us, agree or disagree, however passionately, but read us. Stick with me while I explain how a government official is stepping up, a politician is messing up, the campaign trail is getting bumpy. Chuckle, shake your head, get mad and swear, but read, and I’m a happy guy.

Spin Control started during the municipal campaigns of 2003 to anchor a weekly election page. Colleague and columnist Jim Kershner helped come up with the name, and the column stayed on after the election as a Sunday feature. It became one of the paper’s early online column “blogs,” with stories from the New Hampshire campaign trail in January 2004, and followed the election cycles through another mayoral campaign.

Some Democrats were convinced that Spin Control was just the latest feature set up to jab them, from the paper Harry Truman once called one of the nation’s worst. Some Republicans were sure it was part of the plot by the paper they like to call The Socialist-Review.

Spin Control tried to be an Equal Opportunity Annoyer, but it’s true that Republicans got hit harder some weeks, and Democrats got it worse on others.

For those of you keeping score at home, as baseball game announcers used to say on radio, I’d like to think the score’s tied at the end of nine.

But the ninth inning is up, and whether or not one side’s ahead, game’s over for Spin Control as a column in the newspaper. Other writers have very eloquently explained that things are changing at The Spokesman-Review and almost everyone’s job has new challenges. Mine’s going to be connected to making sense out of those vast oceans of information that are spit out by government, businesses and many other sources. Some of it will be political but some of it will be less ephemeral, and maybe more impactful.

In the news biz, it’s called computer-assisted reporting. Readers may have noticed some examples of it in the stories and maps of campaign contributions broken down by ZIP codes or the vote totals by precinct. There are lots of good stories, political and others, contained in those vast stores of information. My job will be to mine through the big piles of dirt to find the nuggets of gold, and, with a bit of luck or a lot of work, turn it into a something you couldn’t resist reading.

It’s a departure for someone who’s loved being the newspaper’s political reporter since 1984. But a designated political reporter is a luxury the newspaper can’t currently afford; neither the newspaper nor I are turning our backs on politics, but we are spreading the work load around.

Most of what I write will appear first on our Web site, which in one very real sense is exciting because it has many possibilities for things we can’t do in the newspaper. But in another sense, it’s unsettling because, for 34 years, I’ve worked to get something in a newspaper that can be tossed on your door step by tomorrow morning. Now I’ll be trying to get things online as quickly as possible, and in the next edition of newspaper.

Spin Control will disappear from the newspaper, but it will be reconstituted for the online paper, with items from the newspaper’s stable of great government reporters, including Rich Roesler in Olympia, Betsy Russell in Boise and Jonathan Brunt in Spokane. I’ll be contributing from time to time, too, so if you read something that moves you, either there or in the paper, call or write. Even if it’s just to tell me what an idiot I am.