Bill Dedman, msnbc.com – Juneau, Alaska
The public records expected to be released today by the governor’s office in Alaska were among those requested in 2008 by news organizations including msnbc.com.
Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska for 966 days. As of today, msnbc.com ‘s request for public records was pending for 997 days.
Today msnbc.com is taking two steps to provide citizens of Alaska with a copy of their own records.
1) Msnbc.com will share the 24,199 pages of records immediately with volunteers from the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees of Alaska, who will begin reading the records at the city of Juneau’s Centennial Hall convention center, chewing through bagels and the stacks of documents. The volunteers will look for interesting or significant emails, stick a post-it note on the page, and pass them to journalists from msnbc.com and NBC News, who also will be reading.
We’ll be live-blogging what we find, at http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/. Check that page for updates throughout today and the weekend. The Twitter hashtag for updates is #palinemail.
2) In the same room, a second set of the documents will be scanned in for msnbc.com by Crivella West, an analytics and investigative-research company from Pittsburgh, returning the records to their original electronic form, allowing anyone anywhere to join in the crowdsourcing. That free, public, searchable archive will go online, later today, at http://palinemail.msnbc.msn.com. Watch that space.
The archive, hosted by msnbc.com , is co-sponsored by Mother Jones magazine, another original requester of the documents, and by Pro Publica, the nonprofit investigative newsroom. A similar archive was created by msnbc.com and Crivella West for a smaller batch of 3,000 pages of Todd Palin emails last year. Those emails showed the vigorous role the “first dude” played in the operation of state government.
Links:
- Live blog: http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/
- Online archive: http://palinemail.msnbc.msn.com
- Twitter hashtag: #palinemail
- Twitter usernames: @openchannelblog and @billdedman
