Submitting articles to directories - does it worth it now (assuming Google Panda/Farmer changes)?

Dear all,

We all know that Google made a drastic changes in its search algorithm recently resulting in dramatic SERP falls of some IM sites which have been promoted by, among other methods, submitting articles to directories (sorry for clumsy language, I'm not a native speaker myself). Personally, I think that it's a pretty honest change since thousands of spinned atricles backlinked to one's site is not a good thing to make decision on its PR value.

I have just completed my first IM site (squeeze page with subscription box, in fact) and trying to build a list. I got some good content which is ready to be sent to my subscribers but I'm not sure which traffic generation method to follow in first place since it seems to me that using good old spinned articles is a bad idea. Maybe it won't hurt too much but should I waste my time doing it since Google is carefully watching whether site's getting promoted like that? Should I stick with another ways (publishing video, for instance) instead? Is it possible to kill SERP completely because of publishing spinned articles backlinked to my site?

Thank you