NEW YORK, Aug 18 — Irate readers are skewering The New York Times for an article that tried to pass off bubble tea as a new trend in the US, and for using words likes “strange,” “alien,” “exotic” and “blobs” to describe the popular Taiwanese drink that has been around for well over a decade in the US and Canada.
The article by Joanne Kaufman, originally titled “Those blobs in your tea? They’re supposed to be there,” was published in the business section of the paper this week, setting off a fiery backlash from readers and forcing the paper to issue an apology.
In the mea culpa titled “Our Readers Call Us Out Over Bubble Tea. They Are Right,” business editor Ellen Pollock acknowledged: “In retrospect, we wish we had approached the topic differently (if at all).”
Because as readers rightly point out, the dessert drink made with tapioca pearls has been popular in the US and Canada for over a decade, with independent shops and international chains like CoCo Fresh Tea & Juice, Kung Fu Tea, Gong Cha, Chatime, and Boba Guys present in major cities across North America.
The story has since been heavily edited and the headline reworked twice. The final piece now reads “Bubble Tea Purveyors Continue to Grow Along with Drink’s Popularity.”
On Twitter, readers continue to troll the paper.
“This NYT boba piece, besides being comically late & breathtakingly stupid, is exactly why we need diverse newsrooms,” reads one of the more popular replies posted by Los Angeles Times writer Frank Shyong.
Another reader tweeted, “Seriously? New York Times article on bubble tea like it’s 1999.”
The editor’s note acknowledges that the Times published a trend story in the Dining section in December, calling bubble tea “so 2002.”
Though the original story may be tone-deaf for North American audiences, the beverage could be characterized as relatively new for consumers in Cyprus, for instance, which got its first bubble tea shops in 2015.
Coco Fresh Tea & Juice is the world’s largest bubble tea brand with 2,000 stores in countries like South Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, China, the Philippines and the US. — AFP-Relaxnews
