Thrillist Austin Launches Today [Q&A]
The mailer covers everything from restaurants and nightlife to travel, style and gadgets, and inaugurates their Central Texas edition with a nice peek inside the new 24 Diner , which replaced the downtown Waterloo Ice House on Sixth and Lamar.
To get an idea of what to expect from these folks in the coming months, we had a quick Q&A with Austin editor Dan Gentile, who explains how he plans to set Thrillist apart from competing outlets and how it's not just for dudes.
What's Thrillist Austin going to focus on?
Thrillist focuses on finding what's new in town and delivering it in an easily consumable manner. There's a large demographic of people in Austin who are genuinely interested in the cool new bar or food-truck or local clothing line, but they don't have time to do more to get the scoop than leaf through a Chronicle while waiting on a taco. While sources like the Chronicle are great, the idea behind Thrillist is that you're not wading through a mess of information you could care less about, you're getting one email in the morning of a cool new thing around town, peppered with jokes and links to ridiculous viral photos.
Is this a publication mainly geared towards dudes, or is there something for everyone?
Most of the content applies to anyone interested in getting the most out of the city. We try to cover restaurants and bars just as they’re opening, which is relevant regardless of your sex.
Occasionally we'll cover something women have no interest in, like in Dallas we recently wrote about a private bartender service staffed by beautiful women and you get to choose what they're wearing, from Cowboys jerseys to lingerie to lingerie made out of Cowboys jerseys, but very little of the content is divisive.
The humor is pretty dude-centric, but half of the time we're making fun of our readership which is something that women can totally get behind.
How do you see Thrillist Austin differentiating itself from Do512, Launch787, Rare Magazine, and other ventures in a similar space?
Aside from the humor, Thrillist's scope is going to be a little different than the publications you mentioned.
We won't be covering music in the same way that Do512 does, they've grown incredibly comprehensive but our readers would rather know about one awesome event than 10 mediocre ones.
Rare and Launch787 have a narrower focus as far as presenting society-type events and they take themselves a little more seriously.
At Thrillist we're just as likely to cover a new food truck in the middle-of-nowhere South Austin as a downtown fine dining establishment.
How's about a few early pointers about places, drinks, people, and nifty gadgets you're planning to cover in the coming weeks?
I don’t want to spoil any surprises, but I'll probably cover this locally designed iPhone app called StudorDud that performs background checks so if you meet someone in a bar you can totally stalk the shit out of them on-the-go.
Is Thrillist Austin looking for writers to add to its launch staff?
Right now we’re not looking for writers so much as tipsters. For instance if you’ve got a buddy about to open a bar or know somebody locally who is making an interesting product, I’d love to hear about it and I’ll trade some beer money for the scoop.
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