Here’s how the Anchorage Daily News’s Tom Kizzia described what happened next, in a profile that ran in October 2006, just weeks before Palin’s election as governor:

The press was clamoring about the affair. Palin began responding to feelers from local news media. She said later that her college degree in journalism helped her focus on the public process, and she saw that the media could play a role. Once the story finally unfolded in public, press accounts made Palin the hero.

One of those press accounts was a handsome 5,000 plus word article in the Daily News, framed as Palin’s first full reckoning of the scandal. It closed with an admiring quote from a Democratic state senator who interacted with her during the case: “Sarah has been tortured by this for a long time,” he began. “I feel she has never had a chance to let her story out.”

Ruderich admitted guilt and paid a fine, and Palin’s role in the case established something of a natural synergy between Palin and the press corps.

“It has been a very Republican state with a fairly weak and ineffectual Democratic party,” says the Daily News’s Dougherty. “So over time, the newspaper has functioned more as the watchdog and critic of the Republicans than the opposition party. So we’ve often been at odds with the powerful people in the party, and Palin came in opposed to the same people.”

When she relaunched her electoral career by entering the 2006 gubernatorial race, reform and transparency were her buzzwords.

She faced two opponents: former governor Knowles and a former Republican legislator named Andrew Halcro. Running as an independent, Halcro trained his sights on Sarah Palin throughout the campaign.

Halcro, who placed third with over 9 percent of the vote, now good-naturedly describes himself as a “recovering politician.” But in some ways, he never quite stopped running against Palin. His blog, which has become a widely-read clearinghouse for Alaskan political news and gossip, often criticizes the governor.

The blog is loose with sourcing. But it’s widely read, and clearly influential; the Daily News credited Halcro with being the first person to publicly link Palin’s firing of the state’s public safety commissioner to her family’s feud with her ex-brother in law, a state trooper.

“He functions not as a journalist, but sort of as a quasi-journalist,” says Dougherty, who describes Halcro’s writing as the “most antagonistic scrutiny” Palin receives anywhere.

To Halcro, it’s both a question of will and means. He says he sees no great appetite on the part of the state’s press, and especially from the Daily News, to cover Palin aggressively. But at the same time he recognizes that journalists are hard pressed in Alaska.

“When I think back to the gubernatorial race, the press was so light,” he says. “If you had one reporter at an event, great. If you had two, that was really great.”

There’s no question that Alaska’s dwindling press corps is stretched thin.

“We’re always up against just trying to get the job done,” says Lori Townsend, the host of the Alaska Public Radio Network’s Alaska News Nightly. “Everyone has suffered staff reductions, to the point when it’s just a luxury—and it is a luxury—to be able to respond with any depth… we’ve taken a hit in the national media, with people just saying we haven’t been doing our job here.”

The network has left a position that would usually cover Wasilla and its environs, which make up some of Alaska’s fastest growing towns, unfilled. Despite Alaska’s oil boom economy, the ADN—a battered McClatchy property—has gone, in the last thirty months, from a newsroom staff of 104 to 66.

Cutbacks like those are only exacerbated by the state’s vastness, and a string of major corruption stories that have drawn focus and attention away from Palin—while at the same time reinforcing her reformist message. But many of these cuts came after the 2006 campaign, when scrutiny of Palin would have been most helpful to readers.

“Here in Alaska, you’ve got a small and shallow media pool. And politicians, especially Palin, are treated with kid gloves,” says Halcro. “In the last four weeks, the state has gotten to know more about Sarah Palin then in the last twelve years… It’s almost become an embarrassment.”

One outlet that’s been criticized for being too close to Palin is KTUU, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage. Two former members of its on air staff now work for Palin—one on the McCain campaign, and one in the governor’s press office—a fact which has drawn complaints from viewers. Another staffer says he resigned after being reprimanded for a segment he produced that Todd Palin called to complain about. (The station’s news director did not respond to a request for comment, but in a recent appearance on Halcro’s program, defended his station’s Palin coverage and insisted the producer had not been reprimanded, and had given another explanation for his resignation at the time of his departure.)

“I think that the press corps has been easy on her,” says the former Palin administration official. “I think if you look at all the national stories, and compare it to her governor’s race or when she was governor, it’s been impossible not to notice. We didn’t hear about the librarian. We didn’t hear about the rape kits. We didn’t hear about the Wasilla earmarks. We didn’t hear about the land for the stadium deal. We didn’t hear about any of it.”

“I think those things are sort of interesting, but it doesn’t tell me much because it seems old and marginal,” says Dougherty when asked if his paper adequately focused on Palin’s time as mayor. “I think it’s sort of unfair to go back and say, they missed this, and they missed that, without the context,” he adds, of other stories—that might not have even been about Palin—that the paper was busy covering at the same time. He concedes that the paper “definitely” missed “a number of things.”