...that he needs to pay guests just to get them on his new Current TV show.

From Cindy Adams's interview with Olbermann in the NY Post:

Being a smaller network, any difficulty in getting A-1 guests?

"It was a concern considering we're starting from scratch, so I decided to formalize guests. Pay them even if it's not much money. Make law professors, nonpolitical people, contributors. We built this in a matter of weeks, but the baseline is we've formalized it so it wouldn't be a problem."