Thrillist

Okay, so I guess to wrap up that, do we have any mail?

So we don't have any mail, but I was going to read a review that we got from, there's a Thrillist writer who published an article last week called The 15 Best Game of Thrones Podcasts to Get You Ready for the Final

Season.

Yay! Top 15.

Just make something because you enjoy it.

David was the first employee at Thrillist before moving into creative strategy at Group9 and Vox Media, dreaming up campaigns with James Van Der Beek, Christine Ricci, and more, and once spent 14 straight hours at a Buffalo Wild Wings.

He's now writing It's a Fun City, a substack celebrating everything wonderful, weird, and ridiculous about New York.

Because not everything needs an audience or a business plan or a return on investment.

but he was ripping on Dallas.

And I had this incident with an actor.

It was very late and we had been, this was early days of Thrillist and we had had a big fun dinner with everyone that worked for us at the time, which was eight people at one of the supper clubs out in Coney Island, one of the Russian supper clubs.

And we did what you do there.

Brand and advertisers who were eager to sell to this new generation began diverting spend away from these legacy publications and towards these red-hot digital media startups.

Vice and BuzzFeed led the way, but there were also smaller startups like Vox, Thrillist, and Business Insider who surged off these same tailwinds.

Everyone assumed that the business would take care of itself.

No one had ever had this many eyeballs before, and with so many impressions to sell to advertisers, profit would simply be a matter of when and not if.

you could see is the thin beam of a flashlight illuminating nightmarish fairy tales, which is crazy.

The park was described by Thrillist as, quote, trippy and, quote, a psychedelic Disneyland.

And I actually think it's much more apt to compare it to a nightmarish or trippy Efteling, because Efteling also has some similarities to this park, albeit this is the family version of Efteling in that it's a family-owned and operated park.

And the storybook nature of it all.

These newsletters that we could send out to 20,000, 30,000 people was literally how you marketed yourself.

Thrillist was there, Food Daddy.

It was before people were focusing on social media.

Urban Daddy, I mean.

Again, I've done work for Eater.

I've done work for, I launched Thrillist in Atlanta and Thrillist was very heavy on its food reporting because we covered openings.

And so a lot of what I had to do was actually run around and scoop by the demand of the job.

You actually had to have the first reporting on a restaurant or they would kill your story.

I've always been a haunted house fan myself.

I was reading an article from Thrillist.

And what they do is they list the most well-known haunted houses across the country.

And there's one in Arizona called the Jerome Grand Hotel, originally built as a hospital.

Here we are rolling into the last part of today's show.

And as we're getting ready for Halloween next week, we're talking about haunted houses.

Here's another one on the list that's been put out by Thrillist.

Stephen King said his book, The Shining, in the Overlook Hotel, which was based on the Stanley Hotel in Colorado.

Multnomah County's website, research guide, Multnomah County poor farm records.

Coin, Thrillist determines this Portland area hotel is Oregon's most haunted place by Joshua Pettigrew and the paranormal traveler, McMiniman's Edgefield, a portal to the past and paranormal hotspot.

okay

so we're going all over the place i don't know if you're ready for a hodgepodge of both paranormal sources and straight up county records

We do wash the rug.

Yeah.

In 2024, Thrillist published an article calling Edgefield one of the most haunted places in America.

Okay.

...

Kelly, you went on to have subsequent illustrious experiences at Zagat, as you mentioned, Thrillist, Google, even, if I'm not mistaken, and in 2020, you end up in LA.

What brought you to the City of Angels?

I had worked at different publications for, um, about, I mean, honestly, it was like 15 years-ish, and then the pandemic struck.

For sure

... um, I was kinda looking for, like, a little bit of an easier lifestyle.

So I started at Thrillist literally, like, February some- end of February 2020.

The pandemic struck two weeks later, and I was, we were in the office for like, I was barely there for 10 days, and then everyone just, like, bounced.