Palin emails let old media test new media methods

[xchrom]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_PALIN_EMAILS_MEDIA?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-06-12-17-39-52

The analysis of Sarah Palin's emails over the past few days may end up teaching us more about the future of journalism than about the former Alaska governor's past.

Drawing on methods used by both Wikileaks and social networks, traditional news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post used the Palin email dump as an experiment in new media techniques. They sought collaboration from readers and posted massive volumes of documents online before reporters even had a chance to read most of the papers.

That sort of public coordination - often called "crowdsourcing" - has drawn increasing interest from many journalists. David Lauter, chief of Tribune Co.'s Washington bureau, said he and his colleagues have wondered whether it would be a more productive way of analyzing data.

"It's a concept that we'd been looking at," Lauter said. "This seemed like a great opportunity to test to see how it might work."









hmmmm...i wonder if the palin team thought this would happen?
gonna be a lot of sleuths sniffing around.

[shraby]

1. Talking Points Memo did that with another document dump

a couple of years ago. Had their readers go through and flag the interesting ones by page, name and a brief line or two of what it was about.

[Brickbat]

2. It's a lot cheaper than Guild rate, I suppose.

[xchrom]

3. That bothers me - in this case the amount of redacted material

Calls for a lot of sleuthing - maybe from unorthodox sources.