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."

The Italian government has extended its provision within the Media and Wiretapping Bill, "obbligo di rettifica", or rectification obligation, a law dating back to 1948 that requires newspapers or anyone "responsible for informative websites" to publish corrections, and passed a new law aimed at restraining online freedom of speech under the Berlusconi leadership, TheInquirer.net reported.

This law requires Italian bloggers, podcasters and users of social networking sites like Facebook to rectify "incorrect facts" published, and post corrections within 48 hours of receipt of complaint. Any failure to abide by the law within the timeline provided would result in the imposition of a fine of up to €25,000 to be paid by the author or publisher.

Image: Italian President Berlusconi
The European Digital Rights (EDRI), a pan-European coalition of online civil liberties advocacy organisations, and Italian journalists who call this bill "authoritarian" warn that it might darken much of the Italian cyberspace comprising of small-scale bloggers, website owners and users who comment on discussion pages, as they will be left with little or no time to deal with complaint requests and publish corrections within the time span allotted, EUObserver.com reported today.

The Washington Post is creating a "local blogging network," in which the newspaper will link to selected blogs from its Web site, Adam Pagnucco of Maryland Politics Watch wrote last week. As part of the network, the Post would ask bloggers to submit original content, which would be edited by Post editors. The Post would also have rights to that content through a written agreement, and expect that bloggers participate in a blogger "discussion" each week and stick to a "workflow" plan.

The only problem with the set-up is that the Post wouldn't actually pay the bloggers, he stated.

Pugnacco wrote in the Maryland Politics Watch blog: "Five weeks ago, I received an unsolicited offer from the Washington Post. They asked if they could post my picture and biography on their Web site and link to every new blog post appearing here if I agreed to produce regular original content for them at their request. I turned them down. Why? Because they wanted me to work for them for nothing."

Using Google subscriber counts, Pugnacco estimates that "MPW's rag-tag band of volunteers, guests and rogues has slightly more regular online subscribers than the Post's entire paid staff of Maryland reporters combined. Remind me again why WE should be working for the Post for free?"

Worldwide, bloggers have reached 184 million people, according to Universal McCann in March 2008, while 26.4 million of them were from United States. Additionally, there were 346 million people worldwide who read blogs, or 77 percent of active Internet users, 60.3 million of which came from the United States, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2009 reported.

According to comScore's data in August 2008, there were 77.7 million unique visitors in the United States, out of the total 188.9 million online population.

eMarketer's data shows that in May 2008, there were 94.1 million U.S. blog readers, or half of the Internet users. The number of bloggers reached 22.6 million, which represents 12 percent of all online users, according to the report, World Digital Media Trends 2009, released by SFN and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.