Working hard for the swag, the future of game journalism?

DS-X sends us a tip that a writer from a fairly popular video game site showed up on Games Press begging for swag. Is this the one of the real reasons that people get into the whole gaming journalism thing? For t-shirts? This is only one writer and in no way (hopefully) represents the entire state of game journalists, but what do you guys think? Is working for swag a fair deal? Also as I’m sure you’ve noticed I blacked out the name to protect the poster.