Dear readers,
Tomorrow’s Daily Bruin front page will be an advertisement. We haven’t quite finalized the format yet, but it will either appear as a wrap of the paper that you can remove or it will be embedded in our first two pages.
We have never run an advertisement of this nature, and because it might be confusing, I feel obligated to warn you in advance.
The advertisement might appear to be the front page of a newspaper, but the articles are written by a marketing department, not journalists, and should not be mistaken for content produced by trained Daily Bruin writers and reporters.
All of the B’s appearing on the front page will be scratched out, and our second page will explain the gimmick.
The real front page of the Daily Bruin will appear after the advertisement.
As far as I know, we’re one of the first papers in the country to explore such a dramatically different advertising model, and we will likely not be the last.
The Bruin’s budget doesn’t look good right now, and unfortunately we were faced with the prospect of making several thousand dollars worth of cuts to our department or running this advertisement.
We do not intend to make this model permanent, nor make it an option to other advertisers in the future.
Until we can begin to work toward solving our ongoing budget problems, I hope you can understand, and I look forward to your continued readership.
Thank you,
Anthony Pesce
Editor-in-Chief