What’s it like to journey to Alaska and sift through thousands of pages of Sarah Palin’s email? Tumblr may be your best bet for a ringside seat to this rather inglorious assignment.
As one of the tens of journalists who packed their bags and descended upon Juneau to pour over 250 pounds of the former Governor’s electronic correspondence, Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein has a unique perspective. And like other reporters, he’s turned to Tumblr, a flexible and simple blogging platform with a community that actively shares interesting posts.
Unlike Twitter, which is limited to short text updates and links, Tumblr allows the posting of video and photos, making it ideal for behind-the-scenes documentation of adventures like Weinstein’s.
“It looks like it might be a bit of a media circus tomorrow, so, stay tuned,” said Weinstein in a short first-person video he posted from the Juneau airport he posted Friday.
“There was a large number of media on our flight. We had Washington Post and ABC right next to me”, panning his mobile phone from himself to the tiny baggage claim, “That’s Bill Dedman from MSNBC.com, he’s one of our partners with the database that we’re going to try and get online for all of the searchable Palin emails.”
The ease with which Weinstein says this belies the weight of the task at hand.
While you spent the weekend relaxing, Weinstein and others started scanning 24,199 printed pages of Mama Grizzly’s inbox to create a searchable public database freely available online putting the team at a very real risk of papercuts. The entire 250-pound archive is being returned to digital form over the next three days. (The antiquated paper format — why deliver emails as printouts? — becomes even more ironic when you realize it’s taken almost three years to deliver. Mother Jones DC Bureau Chief David Corn filed the original request for the emails way back in September of 2008, shortly after Palin’s introduction to the lower 48 states as John McCain’s vice-presidential pick.)
Weinstein’s Tumblr posts are part of a wider effort to show readers what it’s like on the inside of investigative journalism from Mother Jones. “If you’re savvy to the Twitters, keep an eye out for the #PalinEmail hashtag, where our whole crew will be sharing its labors through Friday and the weekend,” Weinstein wrote on the Mother Jones blog before departing San Francisco. “I’ll be pulling an all-nighter Friday, after all. Or, since it’s Alaska in June, an all-dayer.”
With Tumblr, he made it easy for those interested not just in the contents of Palin’s emails but the way in which they were uncovered to stay with him day and night.
