Plenty of Web startups begin with a good idea and fail because it’s just plain hard to build software well, and Web sites are tricky beasts, and getting users isn’t easy. Then there are the startups where the trouble isn’t with execution; it’s with the initial idea. The company has simply set out to solve the wrong problem.

I have to say that Spinspotter, which debuted at Demo today, looks like it’s in that latter category to me. This is a site that uses an algorithm to detect what it defines as bias or “spin” in news coverage. (Here’s coverage from the Times, the Journal, and BusinessWeek.)

The pitfalls and perils in getting an effort like this to work in any sort of way that doesn’t evoke titters are legion. But let’s not even bother with that part of the debate. (Businessweek offers a list of the six criteria, which include everything from too much passive voice to too much “reporter’s voice.”) The real issue here is that the very idea of SpinSpotter is wrongheaded.

Is having a computer program scouring news articles and underlining each appearance of what it defines as bias going to improve any journalist’s work, or any reader’s understanding of the news? If Spinspotter succeeds in redlining every appearance of what it considers “bias” from the news, surely the resulting gelded coverage — deprived of any trace of anyone’s voice, echoing with what Jay Rosen calls “the view from nowhere” — will no longer be of interest to any reader more human than the Spinspotter code.

There is plenty of room for Web sites and services that enable us to better sort fact from fiction, to help us think about what coverage is fair and what is duplicitous, to figure out who we might want to trust and who we might want to distrust among our media sources. But the helful site needs to start by asking those questions — not by simply exhorting its users to “Find bias and tear it a new one.” (The slogan makes me all warm and nostalgic for the blogosphere’s old promise of “we can fact-check your ass.”)

The complaints about “bias in the media” today do not emerge in a vacuum. It’s not as if there were some platonic ideal of news, an attainable and perfect “objective news reporting” standard that our reporters and editors just need to sweat a little harder to achieve. The frequent accusations of bias you hear today, from every point on the political spectrum, are a symptom of the extreme divisions in our political system and our nation.

Journalists are human beings. “Objectivity” is not within their capacity. Bias will always be charged. Sometimes it will come as a result of genuinely shoddy journalism, where reporters have slanted coverage unfairly based on their own prejudices; sometimes it will come as a result of shoddy news consumption, where a reader just doesn’t like the facts that a reporter has presented because they conflict with his world view. Spinspotter promises both “wisdom of the crowd” style voting and human “referees” to build checks and balances into its system. But I suspect these will just end up either recapitulating the left-right fusillades that already fill the political blog-comment-sphere, or reproducing the “view from nowhere” bromides that satisfy no one.

SpinSpotter’s design starts from an assumption that there is some abstract and definable concept of “bias” independent of our own relative perspectives. But we all encounter the biases in the coverage we read through the lens of our own pre-installed biases. And so what? Every act of journalism is biased! We can’t and shouldn’t set out to eliminate bias from journalism, not only because it is impossible but because it is unwise. Instead, we should expect journalists do a better job of being fair and accurate and passionate in their quest for the truth as they see it. We should help readers find the journalists they trust and question the ones they don’t. And we could all use help finding our way through this new era when there is little boundary left between the one group of journalists and the other of readers.

The real problem with our media in this decade has not been too much bias. The problem has been that too often our most influential journalists have not stepped forward to call out official lies. We have suffered from a surfeit of “on the one hand, on the other hand” journalism, which is a poor substitute for anyone’s truth. The Spinspotter-style effort to eliminate “bias” ultimately leads down the road to more of that ritual, not less.

Spinspotter’s home-page rhetoric crows, “The truth is back in town”…”Behold the epiphany of unfiltered news”…”take back the truth” — as if the truth were some golden residue left behind once you have stripped off all the layers of bias you can find. But I think that, even if Spinspotter could somehow perfect its algorithms and unerringly remove all the human perspective and “reporter’s voice” from the articles it points at, you’d find there’s nothing of any value left.

I saw this on Twitter today from Jay Rosen:

Publishing used to be the barrier. Now that publishing is easy, getting your stuff picked up, linked to is an essential skill.

Jay was responding to a question from Howard Rheingold, who asked:

Skills for digitally-savvy journalists: RSS, map mashups, widgets, Twitter (video goes without saying). What else?

I read Jay’s answer and had two thoughts. One, this is absolutely right. Two, it is an insight that most working journalists today — at least those who are working for some newspaper or broadcast outlet or magazine, as opposed to those who have already lighted out for the online territories — are occupationally blind to.

They cannot see this because, all their working lives, the business of gathering their audience has been handled for them. Whether you are a brilliant journalist or a total hack, you get accustomed to assuming that you have a lot of readers because you are gifted and wonderful and creative. Whereas, in truth, whether you are in fact gifted and wonderful and creative, or not (and you? you are — of course you are!), you have those readers because you work for some company that has supplied them for you.

In other words, most journalists confuse what they have inherited ex officio with what they have earned through their own talent and sweat. It’s comforting but fundamentally unrealistic. (See Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody for more on this.)

This privilege disintegrates out on the Web once you leave the protective umbrella and traffic supply of a media company. For instance, this little blog used to be associated with Salon.com. In its previous incarnation as part of the Salon Blogs program, it got a significant amount of traffic off Salon’s home page. That was great — but it didn’t have much to do with the quality of what I was producing. (I suppose if I had raved like a lunatic or begun to peddle miracle cures, David Talbot or Joan Walsh would eventually have spoken up.)

When I left Salon the blog became an independent entity. Of course its traffic declined. I could have poured my energy into posting round the clock and promoting the blog — maybe I should have! I’d certainly have had fun. But I’ve been writing books instead. That challenge, at this point in my life and career, feels like it’s pushing me harder and teaching me more. And it’s a living. So the blog is a side effort, and I’m content, for now at least, with its being a poky little personal blog that people who are interested in my work can follow.

So the blog goes along day by day with a few hundred page views (measured for real, conservatively) or maybe breaks a thousand or two on a good day, and I’m fine with that. But then every now and then somebody I don’t know decides to promote something I’ve written on some high-traffic Web crossroads — and suddenly, blam, the traffic goes through the roof. For instance, last week I posted my thoughts on Sarah Lacy’s book. My regulars read it (or not), and I moved on. A week later, some kind soul posted a link to this review over on Y Combinator’s Reddit-style “hacker news” feed, and, blam, thousands of people were reading it –or, you know, at least loading it in their browsers.

Thank you to whoever did that. Writers are always grateful for readers.

This is the way the Web works. If this (or any) blog were my primary focus, I’d be out there rustling up readers for it, because that’s what you have to do. I think a lot of journalists still see this as a grubby, low, self-promoting activity that is beneath them. Of course, it can be done in a grubby way (and often is) — but that’s true of everything. Writing headlines is, after all, another form of the art of rustling up readers. It can be done with style and flair; it can be done crudely and effectively; it can be done clumsily and stupidly. But it must be done. There is no alternative.

Watching how Salon’s home page drove traffic to all its stories through the years depending on the quality of the headlines we wrote taught me to respect this art. The business of publishing a book and figuring out how to get it noticed taught me even more not to look down on it. It is, as Jay said, an essential skill for any journalist who does not already have some guaranteed audience in the back pocket. Those guarantees are increasingly rare — for entry-level folks, they’re virtually non-existent. Relying on them might be even more painful than learning some new tricks.