'Citizen Journalists' Don't Get a Pass on Ethics

How many major national scoops do you have to get before you cop to being a journalist?

I ask because of Mayhill Fowler, the 61-year-old teacher who has twice managed to set the political press agenda with her guerilla reporting from the campaign trail, and who now stands accused of exhibiting shady ethics.

Fowler, a contributor to the Huffington Post's "Off The Bus" citizen-journalism project, was the one who taped Barack Obama talking about "bitter" small-town voters at a fundraiser, and she's also the one who, last week, recorded Bill Clinton fulminating about Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum. In neither case did she warn her subject that his remarks would be published.

But that's okay, says Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU and Off The Bus's co-director, because Fowler didn't have much time to identify herself as a journalist (in the latter instance) and, moreover, because she's not a journalist in that sense that she's only one of very many unpaid contributors to Off The Bus. "I'm not sure we can tell all 1,700 contributors, 'You're all reporters for the Huffington Post,'" he told Politico. "That's not really true."

But in that case, what is Fowler? Consider the facts: She attended a campaign event armed with a digital recorder and a business card, and with a question she'd thought up in advance, knowing that the answer she elicited, if sufficiently newsworthy, would be published in a major online news outlet that employs a slew of editors and writers, several of whom are daily fixtures on cable news.

In fact, there's a perfect word for what Fowler is, and it's not some newfangled bit of internet jargon but a term familiar to newspapermen of generations past: She's a stringer. And just as The New York Times and Newsweek expect their stringers to avoid embarrassing them by observing codes of conduct, so Huffpo, if it wants to have credibility as a news organization, ought to make its stringers -- all 1,700 of them -- play by the rules.

And if Fowler "loses" her business card again next time she's chasing a gotcha quote, Huffpo and Off The Bus ought to send her packing. Being a "citizen journalist" doesn't mean you get to pose as a citizen and then publish as a journalist.