Reporter Fired for Stripping: Fair or Foul?

A Texas reporter was fired from the Houston Chronicle this week when a rival newspaper, the Houstan Press, published a story about her nightlife as a stripper in an article called "Sarah Tressler: Houston Chronicle Society Writer By Day, Stripper By Night." The Press realized that a blog called Diary of an Angry Stripper was written by the same woman who did high society journalism for the Chronicle and jumped at the opportunity.

On Monday, after she had been fired, Tressler wrote, "At its heart, this thing feels like a reflection of America's relationship with money and with what people think it means to be a stripper, or to be a reporter ... and the trickiness of labels ... I felt like the Press was being mean to report this because my termination was, I think, a foreseeable outcome. And since when does Mary from Sugarland need to know that I have a little hobby and a little blog to write about it? They needed a story, so they used this."

Richard Connelly, the Press writer who broke the story, added this to the article in post: "If you want to be a stripper, fine. If you want to write for a very conservative, uptight paper -- covering the very powerful, very conservative and straitlaced people the paper so desperately works to keep happy and unruffled -- fine. If you want to combine the two, it's interesting, to say the least." Do you think Sarah Tressler deserved to be fired for stripping?