As a subscriber to an e-mail listserv for journalists, I receive numerous postings of interest to people in the business of disseminating information. Topics such as the buying and selling of newspaper chains, and the pros and cons of researching news stories over the Internet are hotly debated in this electronic forum.

In Spinwars.ca, former Toronto Star Ottawa bureau chief and Mulroney administration press secretary William J. Fox writes from the assumption that the intricacies of the media world will be of interest to a larger reading public.

However, the book he’s written only partially capitalizes on this assumption. Although Fox decries what he calls “the political equivalent of insider baseball – a dialogue that excludes the very public that both [politics and baseball] are dependent upon,” he just can’t seem to resist inserting his own insider references. While possibly meaningful to those well versed in the intricacies of Canadian political reporting, these anecdotes will mean little to the average reader.

Spinwars.ca is equal parts personal reminiscence, hard-nosed analysis of Canadian media culture, and academic communications theory. Fox is at his best when he concerns himself with the first two categories; after all, he has occupied positions of the highest rank on both sides of the media/public relations equation. He succeeds wonderfully when describing his colleagues in both camps, and how the lines blur when the one side comes into conflict with the other.

But we don’t get much on the digital age until Chapter 7, entitled “Cyberspace,” which is well past the book’s half-way point. This is a shame because Fox does make some excellent points on the way digital delivery modes are changing the news world. He examines the rise of the Internet as a research tool for journalists, the huge increase in consumer access to the news created by what he calls the Net’s “libertarian soul,” and the thorny issue of how to evaluate the quality of news content within the free-for-all Internet forum.

For journalists – established or budding – Spinwars.ca will likely make for a lively read. For a general audience, however, there might be too much specialized material here to “spin” into understandable information.