Daily Bruin 'financial situation is grim'

Editors at UCLA's student paper "begrudgingly" ran a full-page ad for Haagen-Dazs wrapped around today's front page, and say in an editorial that it's a "regrettable but relatively unavoidable consequence of the recent financial trends devastating our sources of revenue and our industry."

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.

The reality of our financial situation is grim, and the fact of the matter is that we would have been forced to cut thousands of dollars from an ever-tightening budget if we had not run this advertisement.

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.

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

Editor Anthony Pesce also writes in a front-page note, "We will not be selling these kinds of ads as long as I remain the editor of this news paper — which is at least for another nine weeks."