Anyone who has interacted with me about how I run Slabbed knows I have just a few rules of the road, most of which are geared to keep the discourse free wheeling and real. Ideas do not scare us in the search for the truth, even those that turn out to be “borrowed”. I mention all this because over the past few days I’ve heard from a couple of our readers regarding the Gambit column on Jim Brown’s weekly column which is in reality a regurgitation of Mark Moseley’s Len’s column on the same topic that we featured here on here Slabbed back in May. I was at a bit of a disadvantage as Gambit does not immediately put its print edition online thus I did not have access to it here in the mountains of north Georgia until today and was surprised to find not one story but two on this topic as the dog days of summer have evidently dried up the news in metro NOLA leaving time for us bloggers to shoot a few spit balls at each other.
That said I’ve always liked a good spit ball fight going back to my high school days so I enjoyed reading Kevin Allman and Alex Woodward’s story on Jim and his weekly column and was amused to see Slabbed mentioned so many times in it, no doubt as a result of the decision I made to continue running Jim’s column here on Slabbed despite the comments Mark Moseley left here pointing out the non attribution problems in certain of Jim’s columns.
My reasons are pretty simple as we began as an insurance blog and the fit with Jim’s expertise made him a natural source of information for us. That said I also had other reasons to interact with Jim as our paths crossed during his criminal prosecution real-time (without Jim knowing). Unfortunately that pesky rule 301 prevents me from elaborating further on the details there beyond saying I think Jim was railroaded on his lying to the FBI conviction. I’ll add the Louisiana Supreme Court evidently agrees with that assertion as Jim subsequently got his law license back. I had and still have other reasons to stick with Jim besides that fact that many of his columns are very good, even some of those I didn’t particularly agree with. Even better is the fact that after Mark wrote that column for the Lens, Jim’s level of attribution went up noticeably as he did indeed take it as an invitation to improve his craft. Continue reading “You know you’ve arrived as a media outlet when you copiously make the Gambit….”