The Huffington Post's most touted citizen journalist, Mayhill Fowler, has quit the Huffington Post, according to a blog posted on Washington Post. She is known for scooping the pros twice during the 2008 presidential campaign, recording Bill Clinton's tirade against Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum and quoting Barack Obama saying working class voters "cling to guns or religion."

Fowler took to her own blog to explain why she quit: "I want to be paid for my time and effort - or at a minimum, to get a little remuneration in return for the money I spend myself in order to do original reportage. I would not expect to be paid for punditry. The Huffington Post business model is to provide a platform for 6,000 opinionators to hold forth. Point of view is cheap. I would never expect to be paid there when the other 5,999 are not. However, the journalism pieces I have done in the past year seem to me as good as anything HuffPost's paid reporters Sam Stein and Ryan Grim produce. Why do they get money, and I do not? I don't recall either of them writing the story about Barack Obama waxing large on "clinging to guns and religion," which seems more and more as time goes by to be the one big story out of the last presidential election to live on. Or at least it is the one that journalists and pundits are quoting regularly now."

Photo of Mayhill Fowler via Gawker

Having started off as an aspiring unpublished writer, Fowler and grabbed the opportunity to cover the Obama campaign as an unpaid contributor in 2007 for the HuffPo's OffTheBus blog. Since then, she has filed hundreds of posts that generated headlines. Thinking of herself as one of the site's 6,000 "opinionators," she sooner realised her professional worthiness of being paid for reported articles like other staff reporters. Mayhill, now 64, was finally forced to quit as the publisher failed to recognise her efforts and compensate her for the same, according to the Washington Post.

Calling Arianna Huffington the "quintessential opportunist' and the media industry as "a dog eat dog world" on her blog, she quoted e-mail exchanges with HuffPo founding editor Roy Sekoff and Huffington, wherein she highlighted a few points that in her words, "Arianna & Co. do not seem to understand, although, of course maybe they just don't think I'm a good enough reporter to be worthy of paying."

Insisting on the fact that citizen journalism efforts shouldn't go unrewarded or unpaid, she said, "The dignity pay confers upon work," NYMag.com reported. Warning future citizen journalism aspirants and enthusiasts she said, "In the end, what you are doing really is enhancing somebody else's bottom line. And think for a minute what it means when you throw yourself into working for a place, as I did, without first walking into the company's human resources office to sign some paperwork that legally binds you and your employee to a relationship."

However, the HuffPo and other sites like it argue that they are a large platform that can drive traffic back to unpaid writers' sites.

In response, HuffPo spokesman Mario Ruiz said in a statement: "Mayhill Fowler says that she is 'resigning' from the Huffington Post ... How do you resign from a job you never had?" Yahoo News reported. "One recommendation: in the future, she should refrain from publishing private emails with her editors without their permission. This happens to be both an old media and a new media ground rule," the statement also said. This prompted Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan to quip: "Haha. A ground rule in actual jobs, maybe. That requires a paycheck."