Ask the Editors

This week the Daily Bruin received more than one concerned e-mail asking why we had not covered the recent allocation of $80,000 of student money to the Concerts for Cash event.

Some background:

- The money was allocated by the Undergraduate Students Association Council to the USAC president’s office from budget surplus.

- “Concerts for Cash” was a huge campaign goal for the student government slate Bruins United, of which USAC President Gabe Rose is a member.

- The idea for the concert is to raise more money than is put into it, and then give that money back to the students.

- Some student groups are mad because they want the $80,000 to be spent directly on students now, rather than waiting for a potential return on the investment down the line.

The short answer to this concern is that we are covering it. Look at the paper today and you will see a story written about this by our USAC reporter, Sarah Jo.

It took a few days to get together because there was a delay between when we went to the USAC meeting where this happened and when students began expressing concerns about it. Once we found out about the controversy, we had a reporter begin to work on the story, and then from there it took a few days to get all of the information we needed.

But this question can be applied more broadly to our coverage as well. Often, people from the UCLA community send us story ideas, and often, they do it anonymously.

When we start to look into any story we have to balance getting it to our readers as soon as possible with making sure we have time to do the research and reporting necessary to complete the story. Unfortunately, we are not always able to print things as soon as we hear about them, but we do our best.

So if you ever send us a concern or an idea for a story, have confidence that we are looking into it almost immediately.