By which I mean journalism that involves doing an experiment. In this example, two New York journalists measured reaction to two versions of strawberry milk. The low-rent version did surprisingly well.
A friend and I were once thinking of writing newspaper articles about parking illegally in various places in San Francisco and measuring how long until we got a ticket. News you can use.
What would have been interesting is had they segmented out the experiment via target demographic. I suspect that the Nesquik stuff would have crushed Momofuku in Nesquik’s demo i.e. five to 10 year olds.
I also wonder if (I forgot the proper name for this phenomenon) the fact that liking cheap-y foods is just not cool*, especially not amongst New York Mag readers, skewed the reporting of their preferences. That is to say, there is something nostalgic about the sickly sweet, artificially colored milk.
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*For the record, McDonald’s pulls a great coke, and their fries are simply unbeatable. I don’t care how sweet potato gastro-pub you wanna get….
I’d actually like to see the parking ticket story. I’m sure cops would immediately make it irrelevant by heavily ticketing those areas that took the longest to continue to use uncertainty as a deterrent. Of course, that would also make a decent follow up piece.
Patrik, that’s a great idea: taste test expensive food with little kids. Spy did an experiment where they had a gallery opening with art on the wall by little kids (“My Kid Could Paint That!”).