Updated 1:54 p.m. Eastern Time

 

After a years-long delay, the state of Alaska released over 24,000 pages of emails from Sarah Palin's time as Alaska governor on Friday.

 

The emails were released as paper printouts to the media outlets that requested them, among them CBS News, which has a reporter in Juneau collecting boxes of emails. The six boxes of emails were in excess of 100 pounds; media outlets paid $725 each for access to them.

 

Journalists are now busy reviewing the emails, which includes emails from and to Palin and her staff, for nuggets of information from Palin's roughly half-term as Alaska governor. A number of media outlets also had plans to scan the emails and make them available publicly, and some are asking readers to help review them. (It is not entirely clear why the state is not simply making the emails available electronically.) The first few pages have already appeared online; you can see them here or here. 

 

The emails were first requested back when Palin was the Republican vice presidential nominee. Multiple media outlets requested the documents, and the state lumped all the requests together. The release covers emails from the start of 2007 to September 2008 - most of Palin's time as governor, though not all of it. (She served from December 2006 through the summer of 2009. The emails from the remainder of her tenure have been requested, but the state has not yet reviewed them.)

 

Alaska is supposed to respond to document requests within ten days, but they can ask for extensions, and they did so repeatedly when it came to the Palin emails, which were first requested in 2008.