Reporters scramble to show Palin to world

MAT-SU — Forget “Home of the Iditarod,” Wasilla’s new worldwide identity is “Home of Sarah Palin.”

Dozens of members of the media continue to swarm Wasilla, kicking over stones and knocking on doors trying to find more information to slake the public’s insatiable curiosity about Alaska’s governor and surprise pick as the GOP vice presidential candidate.

Probing for any stories from her childhood to the recent Troopergate controversy, reporters have inundated Wasilla City Hall with requests for interviews from Mayor Dianne Keller and public records from city staff.

Public records requests have been running at a level of 25 to 30 a day, according to City Clerk Kristie Smithers.

“Normally it takes us about six months to get up to 30,” Smithers said. “It’s been enormous.”

In response, city employees compiled the city’s legislation and council minutes during Palin’s tenures as a councilwoman and as mayor and burned them to CDs.

Smithers said those two hours of work, and posting records on the city’s Web site, reduced the workload in her department. The newly redesigned site has a special page devoted to information on Palin.

“That really, really helped a lot,” Smithers said.

It’s also helped push the normal number of hits on the city’s Web site from about an average of 25,000 pages hits a day to about 200,000. On Friday, Aug. 29, the day Palin was announced as the VP pick, the city’s site recorded 686,000 hits.

Keller has been devoting much of her mornings to giving 10-minute interviews to worldwide media; the afternoons she devotes to city business, that goes on despite the requests for information.

At Wasilla High, Principal Dwight Probasco has been the point man answering questions about the school’s most famous alumnus. He fielded 24 such calls last Friday. On Saturday, he escaped the madness by flying to Fairbanks to watch the WHS football team in action. Sunday, he opened the school for interviews with CNN, Inside Edition and Al Jazeera. This week it’s included reporters from news media in Norway, Germany and Japan.

Probasco said Thursday he was glad to finally get some work done, but says he and the staff at WHS filled an important role.

“We were doing our part to educate the Lower 48 on who Sarah Palin was,” Probasco said.

Reporters like the Wall Street Journal’s Mike Phillips and Ed Pilkington of Great Britain’s The Guardian are among the horde of news writers who are trying to find a fresh angle on the story.

Phillips, a Minnesota native, was en route from his home in Washington, D.C., to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., when during a stopover in Chicago he got a voice mail from his boss telling him to change his itinerary — go to Anchorage.

Phillips admitted he’d rather be in Wasilla — without a coat — than in the frenzy of the convention.

“I had to buy one at Sportsman’s Warehouse,” Phillips said, sporting a new earth-tone jacket.

While Phillips came to Alaska cold — literally and figuratively — he didn’t stay that way.

In one of the odd quirks of fate, Phillips had interviewed the son of former Mat-Su Borough manager Don Moore when Capt. Isaac Moore, a Wasilla High graduate, like Palin, was in Iraq. So Phillips put a call into the Wasilla retiree.

Moore was in California helping his older son, Capt. Tyler Moore, prepare for his fourth deployment to Iraq, but his local calls were forwarded to his cell phone.

“I gave him some numbers to call,” said Moore, who retired from the Borough in 1998, during Palin’s first term as mayor.

Phillips, who covered the tsunami in Sumatra and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans during his 12 years with the Wall Street Journal, called the media frenzy over Palin “utter chaos.”

“This is a little different, so many reporters descending on a small town talking to the same people,” he said.

Phillips was among those who quizzed Probasco.

Pilkington, New York Bureau chief for The Guardian, arrived in Alaska Tuesday night. Wednesday afternoon the London, England, native was, by his own account, still in the maelstrom facing an uphill battle reaching sources in a town not used to media attention under siege by the full force of the media.

“It’s been slightly tricky,” Pilkington said. “A lot of people have their phones off the hook.”

The barrage of media attention makes it a challenge to find a new angle.

“We try to find stories as interesting as possible, describing the town she comes from as accurately as possible, and make it fun to read,” Phillips said.

That effort took him to the Frontiersman office Wednesday morning to look through back issues as he hurried to meet a noon deadline.

“We’re getting a pretty good picture of who Sarah Palin is as a person, as a councilwoman and as a mayor here,” Phillips said. Another effort would look at her role as governor.

Tuesday morning it got tougher to get information. According to Phillips, the McCain campaign held a teleconference early Tuesday, asking family, friends and state GOP leaders to refer questions from the press to the campaign staff.

“The campaign is trying to control the stories, which is in their interest, but not ours,” Phillips said.

Phillips said the hasty effort by media to paint a picture of the surprise VP pick is yielding a mosaic of Palin. By reading and listening to a variety of reports, voters around the world will see a complete image of Palin emerge.

“They can put it all together,” he said.

As for Phillips, he is due back in the nation’s capital by Saturday for his daughter’s fourth birthday party. He’s taking her a stuffed Alaska husky toy. His 6-year-old son gets an Iditarod cap.

He said he will also take back descriptions of the area’s “jaw-dropping beauty” and an “image of a town suddenly thrust into the middle of madness and trying to wrestle with it.”