A year ago I made the simple request of asking for "Spam" to be added to the possible report reasons. It's still absent from the site. Having risen to the top 50 in the guardians just from reporting spam in articles (it's free buzz and you don't even have to be the first to report it!), where I had to type out "spam" in the other box every time, since making that suggestion, I stand by it. I've been asked why it's needed when it still gets removed, so I've compiled some reasons.
It's such a basic and common report reason. It should be in any moderation suite rather than forcing the user to type it out in other all the time. It makes the site look unprofessional and open to spam.
It allows for site statistics on spam to be compiled. Saying you remove a full 1% of content (which one of the update posts previously claimed) looks really bad to investors (etc.), but being able to say X% of that was because it was spam really mitigates it.
It allows for special actions to be taken against spam accounts easily. For example: If an article is removed for spam was posted by a sub-48 hour old account, it could automatically ban and account wipe the poster instead of having to report every article and the account separately.
It allows for sorting it in the moderation queue. A moderator can just look at reports for "spam" and address them all at once, rather than having to switch between types of various judgement calls (slowing down and increasing errors).
Pic unrelated. It's what Illustrious thinks "Spam" looks like.