You’ve Got Mail

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

From the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Politics Blog : The Palin emails:

On Friday morning, thousands of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s official state emails will be released by the State of Alaska.

The documents, 24,199 pages in six boxes, will be released at the governor’s office in Juneau to media organizations that requested them under Alaska public-records laws. The organizations are each paying the $725.97 copying fee charged by the state. We think 16 or 17 organizations will be receiving the documents; we've been having trouble getting an exact number from the governor's office. The ADN is among those that requested them.

Here's our plan: We will be picking up the documents when they're made available at 9 a.m. in Juneau and flying them back to Anchorage. We are sharing our documents with ABC News and KTUU-Channel 2. The plan is to take them to a legal-document service in Anchorage to be scanned and converted into digital files. By late afternoon, we should have the emails on a set of fairly large, non-searchable PDFs that we’ll post here on our Alaska Politics blog. We expect the documents will be converted to searchable PDFs later in the evening (the process of making them searchable takes quite a bit longer). We’ll post those as soon as we have them.

It's our understanding the emails will be more or less chronological and numbered sequentially.

We’ll be reading through the documents starting Friday morning and will be looking for news or context that has meaning to Alaska readers. We expect to be posting updates as we go through them, with additional coverage, as warranted, at adn.com and in the print newspaper. We really don’t know what will be there and how significant the information will be. Palin told Fox News over the weekend, “You know, I think every rock in the Palin household that could ever be kicked over and uncovered anything, it's already been kicked over.”

We’re inviting interested readers, especially those in Alaska, to help. There’s a lot of material here. So we’d like to hear from you about what you think is newsworthy and interesting. Please cite the page number and as many specifics as possible. E-mail to emails@adn.com

Others plan to make the material available as well, although how quickly the mass of paper and be scanned and put online in a usable form remains to be seen.

Among the others posting the documents will be msnbc.com, which will be working with the company Crivella West, to host a searchable database of the emails. The company created a similar, smaller archive when 2,000 state emails involving Todd Palin were released last year under a public-records request.

The New York Times will be posting documents from Juneau and is asking readers for help , as is the Washington Post’s The Fix blog.