News Organizations Want You To Read Sarah Palin's Emails For Them
Tomorrow, the State of Alaska will release 24,000 emails that Sarah Palin sent during her tenure as governor of Alaska. A number of media organizations and individuals made record requests for these documents in September 2008. Even though these are emails, though, the State of Alaska will only make them available on paper. In total, there will be six heavy boxes of paper that will contain emails Palin wrote from the beginning of her tenure in 2007 through September 2008. A massive amount of information like this is something even the largest news organizations can only handle when they get the documents ahead of time and under embargo (as was the case with Wikileaks). Because of this, a number of organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post are crowdsourcing their efforts to cover these documents.
The Washington Post’s efforts are a bit limited, though, as there are only 100 spots available for volunteers. The New York Times’ efforts, on the other hand, are open to anyone who would like to participate. Those who find interesting documents will receive credit from the respective organization.
MSNBC is teaming up with Mother Jones magazine and the non-profit investigative reporting organization ProPublica to cover the release, but has no plans to crowdsource these efforts.
Palin is obviously one of the more divisive figures in American politics today, so the release of these documents will likely spark a lot of discussion. Those in favor of Palin will probably argue that these crowdsourced efforts are just another attempt by the “lamestream media” to discredit her.
