Charles Apple

What is going on in Los Angeles today?

We reported earlier about the controversial L-shaped ad gracing the front of today’s L.A. Times. But then, this afternoon, word spreads that the student daily at UCLA, the Daily Bruin, ran a full-page ad wrapped around its edition today.

On the left is today’s actual front page. On the right is the wrap, designed to look very much like editorial copy:

The advertiser: Haagen-Daaz, which is plugging its new vanilla honey-bee ice cream. The gimmick is that bees are disappearing, so many of the B’s are missing from the headlines.

Sigh…

Daily Bruin editor Anthony Pesce made it clear in a page-one note – that boxed story at the upper right, near the headline “$1.5 million” — that he was not happy with the ad:

If you’re reading this, you have discovered our real front page, fully educated about the plight of the honey bee, and I’m glad you are taking the time to read our newspaper. I want our readership and our community to know that there will not be another advertisement like it for the rest of the year. We will not be selling these kinds of ads as long as I remain the editor of this newspaper – which is at least for another nine weeks.

An editorial in today’s edition elaborated further:

Many of us volunteered to forfeit our pay in order to ensure that the ad would not run, but because some of our staff members could not afford to use their paychecks to make a statement, we have been forced to go along quietly.

…We were forced to make a decision we find distasteful at best – and dishonest and unethical at worst – because of the ever-present and unrelenting reality of the economy and the downturn of the journalism industry….We weighed every possible alternative and appealed to every relevent authority for a solution, but our efforts were ultimately fruitless.

Our hope is that our readers will not dismiss us as the sell-outs we feel like.

The College Media Innovation blog reports that the editorial staff did succeed in getting the headline font changed for the fake nameplate.

(Looks like they have have used the same font, though, only with a heavier weight. The biggest difference we can find is the serif on the left leg of the “A.” Can any typography folks out there elaborate for us?)

Find the College Media Innovation blog here. Find the Daily Bruin editor’s note here and the editorial here.

Look here for a sympathetic editorial from the Daily Californian at Cal Berkeley, which ran a similar ad today, but inside the paper. The Californian opines:

We’re happy that at least they didn’t remove the letter from the masthead. They might never live down The Daily ‘Ruin.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 1:27 pm and is filed under College journalism, Industry woes, News design, Visual ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.