Media Outlets Race For Palin Email Scoops

UPDATE: The #Palinemail festivities are in full swing.

Alaska officials began releasing thousands of Sarah Palin's emails at 1 p.m. EST. Reporters flocked to Juneau for their release, and media organizations then scrambled to scan in the documents and post them online.

Huffington Post appears to have won the race to get the first batch posted. You can check them out here. The New York Times database, meanwhile, is here. And for a guide of what to look for, ProPublica has got you covered.

Mother Jones claims to have spotted the first nugget of note: an email that shows at least some state officials knew that if they wanted to reach Palin, they had to use her personal email address. (You can expect the size of the vast majority of "scoops" to hover right around that level.)

Palin supporters, meanwhile, say the former governor has nothing to hide.

“The thousands upon thousands of emails released today show a very engaged Governor Sarah Palin being the CEO of her state,” Tim Crawford, an official at Palin’s political action committee, told the Washington Post. “The e-mails detail a Governor hard at work. Everyone should read them.”

Media outlets are likely to be busy sifting through the roughly 13,000 emails for awhile. You can follow the action at the Times' The Caucus blog, at Mother Jones, MSNBC, and, of course, on Twitter. (#Palinemails seems to be the crowd favorite.)

Meanwhile, you can read the list of email troves other than Palin's that Slate's David Weigel would rather be reading here.

Original Post Thursday at 5:09 p.m.: News outlets are ramping up in anticipation of Friday’s long-awaited release of thousands of pages emails that Sarah Palin sent and received during her time as governor.

But investigative reporters won’t be the only ones who get to join in on the fun. That’s because a number of websites are planning on posting the documents online in hopes of enticing readers to pitch in and help sift through the nearly 25,000 pages that will be released.

The Washington Post and the New York Times are just two of the outlets who want eager readers to volunteer to play reporter for a day or two and help with what is sure to be a rather tedious task.

The Post will cap the amount of its unpaid help at 100 volunteers. The Times and other outlets, meanwhile, are taking a more-the-merrier approach in their crowdsourcing efforts, and are accepting tips from any and all readers.

Here’s WaPo’s pitch: “Think of it as spending some time in our newsroom.”

The Times sweet talk isn’t as strong, but the paper is asking tipsters to be sure to include their name so they can give credit where credit is due. (Assuming, of course, your definition of "credit" doesn't include "money.")

ProPublica, Mother Jones and MSNBC are also teaming up to make the documents available to the public via an online database.

Palin, meanwhile, doesn’t think all that effort will be worth it.

"I'm sure people are going to capitalize on this opportunity to go through 25,000 e-mails and perhaps take things out of context," she said Sunday on Fox News. "They'll never truly know what the context of each one of the issues were that I was working on that day, or in that time period."

Media organizations requested the records during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Palin was named as a the Republican VP nominee. But at the time, state officials said they weren’t prepared to handle the requests for a number of reasons, including an antiquated electronic database system and the fact that Palin commonly used a personal Yahoo account to conduct official state business.

State officials have now finally finished sifting through the email accounts of more than 50 state employees to round up those emails Palin sent or received from her personal account. The big unveil is scheduled for 9 a.m. local time in Juneau.