Four in the morning

1. Former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon wins a "genius" grant largely for his work on "The Wire." Baltimore Sun

2. Huffington Post to Mayhill Fowler: "How do you resign from a job you never had?" Yahoo

3. NPR praises the LA Times for Bell stories. NPR

4. Tonight's gubernatorial debate between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman airs live on KCRW 89.9, followed by political analysis on "Which Way, LA?" WWLA

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)

On Off The Bus

The New York Times charts the progress Huffington Post's Off The Bus in covering the presidential campaign. The piece is largely a bio of OTB director Amanda Michel, although Mayhill Fowler makes an appearance. Arianna Huffington calls Fowler the "poster child for ordinary citizens being able to impact the campaign."

Fowler power

Should Mayhill Fowler have identified herself as a journalist before reporting Barack Obama's "cling" to guns and religion comment and Bill Clinton's "scumbag" rant?

No, according to Marc Cooper, Fowler's editor at Huffington Post. He commends her ethics to a skeptical Joel Bellman, ethics chair for the LA chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

My two cents: Journalists identify themselves when asking tough question not out of some duty to be polite or show deference, but to ensure that when someone gets got, the story is airtight and above board. It's a rule designed to protect the integrity of the story, not the feelings of the story's subject. You don't want someone saying they were tricked or fooled or quoted out of context when they give up a doozy. You don't want your reporters and editors getting bogged down in explanations and defenses; you want the story to stand on its own.

That's why I see Fowler as a good source, rather than as a journalist. To properly report on what Obama and Clinton said, the reporter must include background and context on how the quotes were obtained and by whom. In other words, Fowler, her politics and her methods, become a part of the story. A reporter who had identified herself first and then recorded Obama's speech or asked Clinton about the Vanity Fair piece could then remove herself from the action and let the words speak for themselves.

The source is the journalist

Had the MSM decided not to replay the recordings Mayhill Fowler made of inopportune comments, would they still stand as scoops?