#PalinEmail: MoJo Goes to Alaska (Video)

Under “fearless” in the dictionary, see Corn, David. Back in September 2008, our DC bureau chief did what came naturally. He asked a question: Could he see then-Gov. Sarah Palin’s emails? Spurred by the meteoric rise of this obscure Alaska magistrate-cum-vice presidential candidate, Corn filed a public records request with state officials in Juneau.

Then he waited. And waited. In the meantime, Palin became a cipher for our nation’s red-state-blue-state complex (as well as its id-ego kick). News broke that she and her staff had done a lot of state business on personal Yahoo accounts, seemingly beyond the reach of John Q. Public. And even after she abruptly left office, the Alaska government threw up delay after delay on Corn’s records request.

Until this Friday, June 10, at 9 a.m. Juneau time. That’s when the state will release 24,199 pages of emails from the Palin administration, including some of those Yahoo messages to and from state accounts. Persistence pays off.

For an alternate definition of “fearless”, see Bauerlein, Monika, and Jeffery, Clara. With Corn and his band of crackshot DC reporters ensconced in the Beltway this week, Mother Jones needed a way to get those email records across the country as fast as possible. So our hard-charging editors-in-chief asked me if I’d be willing to pack a bag, hop a jet, lug a 275-pound handcart of printed emails to a Juneau law firm, and scan the whole shmeer in (while hopefully reading some of it along the way) by Saturday afternoon.

Under “crazy” in the dictionary, see me.

Officially, the state government says it had to give journalists hard copies of the Palin emails, because it lacked the technology to make necessary redactions in an electronic file. That’s plausible. Also plausible is the notion that they didn’t want to make it easy on reporters from the lower 48. If, when I take possession of the pages and try to make them into PDFs, they’re printed in 7-point Wing Dings font, we’ll know which of these accounts was the most plausible.

In the meantime, though, we thought that this Alaska adventure was an awesome way to give readers a window into the investigative process. So even before Corn’s reporting team starts zeroing in on the stories told by the emails…and before our web team ingeniously assembles a searchable database for you all to read the emails yourselves…I’ll take you along for the ride, from maddeningly tight airline connections to Juneau activist crash pads to the presumable circus campout being planned by a who’s who of media at the state Capitol Friday morning. We’ll be posting blogs, tweets, photos and videos in real time, starting with the one at the top of this post.

How to keep up with the latest? 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. And if you’d like to ask me questions or see anything in particular covered while I’m in Juneau, give a holler on the email or the Twitter. Hit me up anytime: I’ll be pulling an all-nighter Friday, after all. Or, since it’s Alaska in June, an all-dayer.

Journalism: It’s all about sacrificing the body!

UPDATE: Greetings from Alaska. My latest video:

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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