An unusual example of media efficiency. There’s a huge new supply available of her e-mails as governor and an eternally huge demand among Palin-hating liberals for new dirt on her. If you’re a cash-strapped editor, why not match one to the other and let the market do your work for you? Palin derangement is like the wind, or the sun: All the media has to do is harness it to provide a limitless supply of productivity.
Just think, if she runs for president, they might be able to outsource whole stories to their liberal readership instead of just document analysis. Then again, they’re basically doing that already.
More than 24,000 e-mail messages sent to and from Sarah Palin during her tenure as Alaska’s governor will be released Friday. Join The Post in digging through them. We are looking for 100 organized and diligent readers who will work alongside Post reporters to analyze, contextualize, and research the e-mails. Think of it as spending some time in our newsroom.
Our hope is that working together, we can efficiently find interesting information and extract new stories that will lead to further investigation. We don’t know what we’ll find, but we want you to be ready and open for the challenge.
The NYT is pulling the same stunt. Am I right to think that this is a novel experiment for major newspapers, one they’re coincidentally conducting on one of their favorite targets? Talking Points Memo used crowdsourcing effectively a few years ago to explore the U.S. Attorneys scandal, but I can’t think of an old-school paper doing a major document dump on its readers and treating it as some sort of joint investigative endeavor. I could be wrong; e-mail us if so and I’ll update. Even if I am, I’m amazed that they’d employ this for Palin, of all people, given the intense criticism it’s going to draw, especially since the Journal and other papers will be reviewing things the traditional way. I guess they figure, after three years of antagonism, why keep up any pretense?
Even so, crowdsourcing’s a smart, sleek information-gathering technique. Thanks to the Times and WaPo for legitimizing it for conservative media like Fox News, which will now happily put it to good use doing oppo research on the left. Exit question: Would you guys mind collating some Weiner stories from off the wires and leaving the links in the comments for me? I’m tired and want to watch TV. Thanks!
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