NY Times asks readers for help reviewing Palin e-mail

The New York Times wants its readers' help going through more than 24,000 of Sarah Palin's e-mails that the state of Alaska plans to release on Friday.

In one of its bigger embraces of crowdsourcing, the Times put out its call to action on Thursday under the heading "Help Us Review the Sarah Palin E-Mail Records."

"We're asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight," the Times wrote in a blog. "Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we'll know who should get the credit. Join us here on Friday afternoon and into the weekend to participate."

The paper has occasionally put out a call to volunteers to help go through the public record. For instance, in April 2009, it asked readers to help comb through the the full schedules of Timothy. Geithner from January 2007 to January 2009, when he was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

It was only coincidence but the Times' very public embrace of a new media tactic came on the same day that we learned that the Huffington Post had surpassed the Gray Lady's monthly Web traffic,