Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Grantland is Bill Simmons’ new website for long-form sports journalism. The articles and essays aim to connect sports stories to larger cultural trends and ideas. They aspire to make sense of sports stories.
Yesterday morning Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten asked readers an ethical question based on a true story — should a reporter ever smoke pot with a source? The question had a few details for readers to consider. The reporter didn’t smoke pot currently but had in his past, he was having trouble connecting with the source who was offering the pot and the sharing of the drug would help build up that trust. And, importantly, the Post has a policy that reporters should never do anything illegal while on the job.
Stop the presses. A pastor has prayed for his “smokin’ hot wife.” Truly this is a story made for YouTube, Twitter, blogs, Google+, Facebook, you name it.
It was almost exactly three years ago that we first looked at a story about a young soccer pro named Chase Hilgenbrinck and his decision to leave the sport for seminary. Hilgenbrinck’s story resonated with readers and viewers and we ended up looking at a few different takes on it.
For this week’s Crossroads, host Todd Wilken and I talked about media coverage of tragedy involving baseball star Josh Hamilton and about news reports on the impact of Illinois’ new civil-unions law on faith-based adoption and foster care services.
I was sitting in the third deck behind home plate at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas, munching kettle corn and sipping a Diet Dr Pepper in triple-digit heat, when the unthinkable happened the other night.
Here’s a fun one. A few days before Easter, the Surfing Madonna mysteriously appeared in a seaside city north of San Diego. The mural attracted a lot of attention, and, when it was ordered removed, the Los Angeles Times wrote this story:
Just for the fun of it, pretend that you’re a line editor at a 100,000-circulation newspaper in the Southwest — say, the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.
