But they managed to make themselves look pretty dirty in the process. And why couldn't they have shown a desire for this level of scrutiny on Obama before he was elected?

From AP:

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."

Tribune dispatched two journalists equipped with portable scanners to Juneau to pick up the thousands of Palin emails and begin digitizing them for online readers. Lauter said the first batch was posted on the Los Angeles Times website about 30 minutes after the documents were released Friday.

The New York Times, using a similar strategy, assigned a team to put all the documents online as soon as possible. It took 14 hours to post all of them.

More at AP.

Here's some video clips on the topic:

Amy Holmes: "the media needs to go to rehab with Anthony Weiner and get over their obsession with this woman"

Isikoff: "I don’t think anybody’s found any bombshells here"

John Avlon: "indecent and creepy"