She quoted Barack Obama saying working-class voters “cling to guns or religion” and recorded Bill Clinton’s tirade against Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum

You may not know her name, but you know the work of Mayhill Fowler, the blogger who scooped the pros twice during the 2008 presidential campaign: She quoted Barack Obama saying working-class voters “cling to guns or religion” and recorded Bill Clinton’s tirade against Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum — stories she landed because neither man realized he was speaking to a “citizen journalist.”

Now Fowler – a member of Second Presbyterian (EPC) in Memphis, TN who is now living in California – is rethinking the role of amateurs in the blogosphere.

On Monday, she announced she’s quitting the Huffington Post: “I have this last year gone out and done actual reportage. I’m no longer going to do that for free. I’ve paid my dues in the citizen journalism department; I’m a journalist now.”

As an aspiring but unpublished writer, Fowler jumped at the chance to “cover” the Obama campaign in 2007 as an unpaid contributor to HuffPo’s blog OffTheBus. She didn’t consider herself a reporter, but she sold her car and borrowed money to hit the trail. She filed hundreds of posts — but nothing else, frankly, that generated headlines. “After the election, I kind of thought Arianna would offer me a job — and she didn’t,” Fowler told us. “My husband said, ‘You don’t fit the business model.'”

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