Blockheads Writing for Free

excerpt:"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," Samuel Johnson is alleged to have told his biographer, James Boswell.

Welcome to a world of tweeting, blogging, iReporting, opining blockheads.

The print media is struggling to survive. One survival tactic, in the guise of "reinvention," is to fill some space with free stuff. Snippets from bloggers or expanded reader responses take their place alongside boxes indicating "most e-mailed articles" or "most read articles," the latter two being two additional free space fillers of questionable value in any print edition. (Who really cares how many times a piece has been e-mailed or read beside the writer who wrote it or the editors who want to know what people are reading?)"