According to reports via the UCLA Daily Bruin’s twitter, the UC Regents have approved a 32% student fee hike. Protesters are lining the hill around Covel Commons at UCLA, where the Regents are convening.
To see the video live, check out the Daily Bruin’s nifty live camera feed:
Aaaaand welcome to Journalism 2.0.
I never usually pay attention to those ads right above my inbox in gmail. They’re ads, afterall.
But recently, as my emails are getting more desperate in search of a job, those ads have been starting to appeal to my desperation.
So I decided to click on this one:
How nice, job openings. Nice pay. No scam. Wow, too good to be true. And it says CBS? CBS is a reputable network, sure why not.
Click.
Hey, this looks like a news site. A television news site. Must be owned by CBS?
Appears legitimate. It even has local Sacramento weather posted!
Keyword: appears.
But wait. KMLT3? That’s not the name of my local channel 3 station…and I’m pretty sure CBS doesn’t own channel 3 here. It owns 13, I believe.
So I clicked on “Home” to see what this site really was.
This pops up:
Huh?!
This is my local news station site:
KMLT3 does not exist, at least as a news source. I Googled it. Thanks, Google.
So what is up with this fake news site? It wasn’t expressly labeled “ADVERTISEMENT” as most fake “news sources” that might appear in newsprint are required to have.
A few months ago, the Daily Bruin reluctantly (and quite bitterly) ran a front page wrap ad for Haagen-Dazs that mimicked the Daily Bruin front page, but substituted an article-like ad about the plight of the honey bee. Clearly, very important front page news.
The editorial board at the Daily Bruin wrote the following in the same day’s paper:
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.
Much of our staff, the members of this board especially, are invested in the Daily Bruin and the practice of journalism on a personal level, and nothing pains us more than to see the cover and name of our beloved publication sullied for the sake of survival.
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 staff was particularly upset that not only was our front page content masked by an ad, the ad incorporated deceptively similar components of the normal Daily Bruin front page content, such as our sidebar with story promos. The ad content could easily be misleading to our readers and make it appear as if we are strong advocates for honeybees or some sort of apiculture aficionados. We’re…not.
In any case, this was an unfortunate sacrifice of our journalistic integrity for some necessary ad revenue.
However, we made as best an effort to differentiate the ad content from the actual content by printing “PAID ADVERTISEMENT” along the border. Though from afar, it’s not so clearly an advertisement…
Back to the KMLT3 ad…which wasn’t expressly labeled an ad…and uses the corporate name of CBS in its link, though it has nothing whatsoever to do with CBS…
What is up with that?
I suppose that one could argue that the link only implies some relationship to CBS the station/company, but really represents whatever cbs11.com is, some shoddy advertisement company that tricks people into clicking on it.
On top of that, it appears to be a legitimate news source, formatted and presented like a real news story. Lies.
It seems illegal, or unethical at best. My knowledge of media law in advertisement is thin, but this misleading advertisement seems very…shady, for lack of a better word at 5:04am.
Alas, ads are a necessary evil in the new media world. I just wish there was a bit more integrity in the mix.
