HuffPost Blogger 'Quits' in a Huff

How does a blogger resign gracefully from a job? Not like this: On Tuesday, Mayhill Fowler, who was a "citizen journalist" during the 2008 presidential elections, published a post on her personal blog titled "Why I Left The Huffington Post." In her post, she reprinted emails between herself and the site's editor in chief, Arianna Huffington, and editor Roy Sekoff. Fowler, who was never told she would be paid for her posts, insisted that she be paid for her contributions to the site. "I've paid my dues in the citizen journalism department; I'm a journalist now," she wrote in one email, adding that she had unsuccessfully pitched the site several stories. In a statement, a Huffington Post spokesman fired back: "Mayhill Fowler says that she is "resigning" from The Huffington Post. How do you resign from a job you never had?... In recognition of the work she'd done, HuffPost paid Mayhill's not-insubstantial expenses for the rest of the 2008 campaign." Fowler had broken an oft-referenced story, that of President Barack Obama calling small-town Americans "bitter" who "cling to guns or religion."