Times and WaPo crowdsource Palin emails

The State of Alaska is releasing some 25,000 pages of emails today from the abbreviated gubernatorial career of Sarah Palin. That’s a lot of pages. So The New York Times, the Washington Post, and some other news outlets are using a process that is becoming increasingly standard in big document dumps: crowdsourcing. They’re asking readers to sign up to read through an assigned section of the emails and look for juicy bits and summarize the rest. It’s an unpaid job but the Post says you can think of it as working in their newsroom for the day. Except at your computer and not in a newsroom at all. More like an unpaid stringer. Like an intern but worse.