As a fellow outdoor writer of Zumbo's (although I don't know him), I posted this thought elsewhere, and will post it here as well:
What happened to Zumbo is an excellent example of why outdoor magazines have editors. What Zumbo said in his blog, I'd be willing to bet any amount of money, never would've made it into the pages of Outdoor Life. An editor would've emailed or called Zumbo and said something like: "Jim, you maybe want to rethink that stuff about AR's?"
His blog, as I understand it, was sponsored by (but neither moderated nor edited by) Outdoor Life. So he had a right to say what he said; readers had the same right to react as they did; and Outdoor Life had the right to shut down his blog and show him the door. It's one of those cases that never would've happened, back before the Net, because an editor never would've allowed it to happen.
Writers often grumble about what editors do to their copy. In this case, I have a feeling Zumbo wishes he'd had an editor look at what he wrote before it went up on the Net.
