James Rainey at the L.A. Times—the embattled L.A. Times!—scored the first interview with 61-year-old Mayhill Fowler, that dogged citizen journalist of the Huffington Post.
No, wait! She’s not a journalist! And she doesn’t want her sources—like Bill Clinton who told her on Monday that Vanity Fair‘s Todd Purdum was a scumbag—to know that either.
"Of course he had no idea I was a journalist," Fowler said by phone from her Oakland, Calif., home, recalling her close encounter with Clinton as a "citizen journalist" for the Huffington Post website. "He just thought we were all average, ordinary Americans who had come out to see him. And, of course, in one sense, that is what I am."
When she got that quote, and when she taped a Barack Obama fund-raiser earlier in the campagin season and ignited the fury of bitter religious gun-owners, she didn’t identify herself as a journalist. "Mr. President," Fowler asked Clinton, "what do you think of that hatchet job somebody did on you in Vanity Fair?"
That was the news cycle this week! (Disclosure: We’re not saying there’s anything wrong with that!)
Let the Poynter Institute and Jay Rosen take it from here. Welcome to the New New New Journalism Wars!
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