Fowler wanted to get paid to do her job

Mayhill Fowler got a lot of attention for herself and for Huffington Post when she quoted then-candidate Barack Obama saying that some folk cling to their guns and religion. But HuffPo never hired her as one of its paid reporters, choosing instead to offer her a "platform" in lieu of real money. So she's quitting as loudly as she can.

Here's part of her parting shot:

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. ... 

 She continues on at length before getting to founder Arianna Huffington:

Don’t get me wrong.  Arianna has many wonderful qualities.  I especially admire her wit and her continual reinvention of herself, in that classic American (especially immigrant American) way.  But she is also the quintessential opportunist.  And I cannot help but feel that, at the end of the day, as I thought I was proving myself to her to be worthy of journalism, she on her part was milking me for everything she could get before letting me go.

 (found via LA Observed)