YouSaid · the spoken record

Zach Stafford

lines on the record: 82
first: 2017-12-27
most recent: 2017-12-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Like all the stuff, like can slide into my DMs. Yes. So we led into that because he didn't know what a thirst trap was, but he was like all over the internet being called a thirst trap. And he's a zookeeper from Alabama that lives in Denver. That's father is now the most famous senator in America for the moment. So we knew that our readers skew very young. They're millennials and readers love headlines that are really snappy. We learn that a lot from Jezebel and Gawker. So we fuse that. So it gets you in and then we have this really deep profile of a young person that has been thrust into the spotlight and now has to talk about being gay because his dad was in this special election. So that's working for us. But we, yeah, thirst traps really do well for the young people.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can. So, what happened with Doug Jens' son is that he had never come out publicly in a few other blogs sort of outing him because he posts thirst traps, which are photos on Instagram that are meant to attract sexual inclinations or messages.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It seems to me, too, there's also a question of age, right? The advocate and out are probably targeted at much older consumers. You mentioned that you guys had a story about Doug Jones' son last night, or at least I read it last night. The headline is Doug Jones openly gay zookeeper's son is more than your thirst trap. Probably not the headline that the advocate would have written.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I may not be anymore. I mean, in terms of if you ask advertisers, maybe not. But for me, it's really important to look backwards to see what comedia has done for us because we, many days, we just tell queer stories and we're looking to see what has been told and what has not been told before and who we've given space to and we haven't. So we see a lot of our roles expanding that space, which a lot of those outlets were not as expensive as people now.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interview, and then out a celebrity in fashion. And then it's very male oriented. There isn't a lot of diversity in gender or sexuality or geographies. So it wasn't as expansive for a digital landscape. And that's why I think they're really for both of them. So they're tripping up because people demand, like with Teen Vogue's rise, people love that you can go to Teen Vogue and get fashion news, breaking news, video, everything. So people are wanting a lot and want space. And those two are such iconic spaces that have only done a few things.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At large, so I report to the editor in chief. Okay. So I was brought in to help diversify what a lot of the magazine looked like, was coming there to attract new people. They were under fire for being too white and too straight. So I came in from the Guardian, was like, let's try these things out. But I think out in the advocate are really great, but they're very segmented in the types of content that each produce now. So as they've grown, the advocate's become very news.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we listened to them. And what's interesting is that they're responding to things I didn't think. I was like, oh, you want to listen to one more?”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leather thing is, but we're doing a lot of A-B testing around time of day, so people log on the grinder, maybe in the morning because maybe they're wanting to meet someone for sexual relations, for coffee, for something related that day. So we have to test what are users looking for in the morning? And what about in the afternoon? What about regions? So when we launch something at 6 a.m. Pacific time, that's actually like late night in London. What type of content goes there? So we are literally like being cartographers around publishing and our editorial. That's so fascinating. And that's what we talk about all the time is that it's really about space place and queerness and what type of queerness because we have to think about our Western Africa users when they get content. They don't know what it's like to watch Woolen Grace. So we can't push that over there. And so we have to think about those things. And I think that's really why when people say, why is Grinder getting into media is that we have all these people that know what Grinder is, they sit on it all day. They are kind of looking for some type of connection. Something else.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're up there without the advocate immediately just due to Grinder's immediate reach. And we're seeing that people either didn't want like the content, they hated the reporting, or they don't want to see Roy Moore in their app. They logged on at 6 a.m. to see another man.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's new. It's so new. We had a conversation the other day with Roy Moore. So we, so something that brought Mitch Moore. Not about Roy Moore, sorry, not with Roy Moore. Sorry. Thank you. But something like, as we both said, like at the beginning, we were like, why grinder? But Reach was the biggest thing for me. And when Roy Moore was up for election in the special election, we realized that, oh, there are like thousands of grinder users in Alabama that may not be voting this round. So why not we do this really intense, well-reported piece about why Romoria is really dangerous and we blast it to Alabama, which would hit like at least 10,000 users, which was kind of in the 20,000. Yeah, 20,000. So we have like a big basis that we can maybe swing presumably all the gays are voting for Doug Jones anyway. But we saw that a lot of people around the world, when we busted worldwide, weren't interested in that. And we have very real conversations in that area. How do you get that? Click-through rates. So we see anywhere from tens of thousand people to hundreds of thousands of people click through the content. That's how within the first two months of launch, we were number three most read LGBT site in the world.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Budgets, advertising revenue, the kinds of things that we can benefit from. And so that's what I'm trying to impart to other LGBTQ women is that, yes, I understand that why you might be trepidation. It's like grinder is, you know, the owner of this, but we are actively able to utilize these things for the betterment and the like more visibility of ourselves.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I'm interested in. So, you know, my job is to hopefully curate and bring in people specifically, part of my job is bringing queer women, non-binary people, trans people. I mean, we are, I'm just so lucky that we have a very diverse and inclusive, intentionally inclusive mindset at Into. And I think people may be a little, I think they assume that because of Grindr and what it is, that is just like a bunch of like gay men that just like sit around and talk about sex all day, but that's that couldn't be further from the truth from my experience. And that's actually at first Zach and I laugh because we both turned down offers from Grinder at first because we were like, this can't be, this, this isn't going to be for us. Right. And so, you know, it was a little bit of a hard sell, but, you know, so far, I felt very excited about the opportunity to be there because there's so much room for growth. And also, queer women never get access to the kind of”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it changed. Right. I think a huge focus for us is not becoming regurgitators of the daily sort of news. And the thing that we really want to do is besides creating our own specific like LGBT international political and like lifestyle for a better lack of a better term. I also come from a big entertainment background. So a huge focus for us is also not just reviewing gay movies or gay television shows or things like that, but just we say it's seen the world through a queer lens. So that's what we want to do with anything that you're talking about, whatever's trending, whatever's hot, whatever's new, we want to present it to our readers through a queer lens. So that means that nothing is off limits for us because it's not gay or because it's not queer or something like that. So, you know, we're trying to hit all areas of interest because queer people are not, you know, we're multifaceted. People think that gay people just want to see one type of thing. And I know that I felt that as a lesbian, that people decide what.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Jude, when you talk about that, again, people are still the use case for Grindr is meeting people, men meeting men, essentially. How do you then turn that into a wider ranging kind of thing? Because they're not going to just, oh, I think I'll go to grind. I would not even imagine getting my gay news from. By the way, I want to get into that in the next section, like what's happened with media because I used to get advocate and out.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. It's all in house. So we have a full team. We have a team of 12 people in Los Angeles in a newsroom there. We have a contributor network of over 150 people so far that have contributed. We do video written every form of content. We have reporters like this week Doug Jones' son came out as gay on Into. We have done the coming out of LCD sound system, Gavin Russum. We do international reporting out of Chechnya. So we have teams, we've hired people from Mike from Rolling Stone, from other outlets that are trend reporters. Trish comes from after Ellen, but I was at the Guardian for years as a police reporter and a columnist doing investigative journalism in Chicago. So we all are queer journalists bringing that content to the”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From content because this is the first time that you've had content in geolocative services together because we do things geotargeted. Like I'm trained as a geographer, so I went to school for, so I think about things in spatial ways.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So there's different sizes. So currently, slice one, we are playing with kind of the tools we have there so that the grinder user experience doesn't change terribly much. So when you log onto the apps and when you go home and download Casey, I don't know if you're allowed to be on right now what your partnership situation is, but when you open it, there's two forms of content that you can get. You can get an interstitial or a pre-stitchial that drops down and looks like a magazine cover. And we treat those like magazine covers because they're in front of millions of people every day. So that's hyper curated content that can go global. But we can also specify it by city or area. You also can get an inbox message. So when you go into where you get messages from lots of men hitting you up, I'm sure. Countless. Countless overwhelming messages. You'll get one that isn't into and it's branded as into. And the brands look very different because Into does live on its own website platform. So it's just an integration within that. But future rounds and slices of grinder will have a different form of integration as we move forward and see what people want most.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think what Grindr has been so successful at is really being able to read its audience and what kind of things they're looking for. Speaking for myself, you know, on Snapchat, I tend to click away from the things that they give me. I don't think they really read me very well. I think we have the ability to know what is going to work and what's not going to work. And I've only been here for three weeks, so I'm much more new than Zach, but they have been able to test, survey, do everything they can to make sure that the readers are basically going to respond positively to what they're given. And everything has been successful so far, I'm happy to say. But, you know, I'm also brought on to Intu to make sure that queer women feel like there's a part for them at Intu specifically. So while I'm under the umbrella of Grindr, Zach probably could speak better to those sorts of things because I'm not as much of a user.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what we saw is that they were really wanting to see themselves in a variety of ways. I remember we did a test around Syrian refugees doing a pageant and we pushed the content through there. And it had huge click-through rates because we can blast it right into their phone, into the app, whether in their inbox or in an interstitial. And we saw them really sitting in there. We saw duration times of like three minutes. And I think it just kind of spoke to young people, not only wanting to see other queer people in the world, but they wanted to see content that was really dynamic like they were. And because we reach so many places, we saw, especially as editor chief, I saw like, okay, now I need to commission work in Georgia, the country of Georgia, by queer people there and about what they're going through on the ground because we're actually touching them. City by city. Yeah.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Video games to play. I have a whole other life. And what we realized through our users is that they were on there looking for other things. They were looking to meet, but they're also looking for information. And when we did surveys, we found that they wanted content too. So we thought, well, let's not just join these things together and see what happens. And in the very beginning, in the beta testing before Trist was there, it was really successful. We saw people really interested in various forms of content that wasn't just travel or sex. People assumed that on Grindr, all we do as editors is commissioned sexy things. And that's not true. Yeah, I thought so. I assume with recode. Very sexy.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a ton of that stuff. Exactly. So as the app has grown, I mean, every day we have 3.3 million people on it that spend at least 54 minutes a day. You don't spend 54 minutes a day only hooking up. That's like impossible. Some of us would love to try to do that, but we don't have the time.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I forget because then it went to Out Traveler after that. Out traveler kind of took over the space. But yeah, so there was always like travel in these spaces.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So there, and we've been, and this is part of that kind of effort to expand the brand, obviously. And a lot of it's just a response to how users started using the app. So as we saw in the beginning, people were using Grindr very kind of in myopic ways. They were only thinking of it as a hookup app. But then as they started traveling, this is what it is. Well, this is what it was built, I guess, in many ways, but it was a way to connect with other people. And then when people were traveling to other cities, they were realizing, oh, I could turn it on in Barcelona and meet other people around me. If you did want to hook up, that could happen, but you also could get restaurants and get other recommendations, which harkens back to kind of these other Chris spaces. That's where travel was at face.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, they all came together. So they were combining in the very beginning of all this digital queer space. There was content and hooking up and connecting all in the same space. So that's kind of like the genesis of the Internet for Queer People because we needed one space to do everything together, just like the bars became that too. The bars is where you got your local gay paper. It's also where you got a drink. It's also where you organized. So these kind of spaces sort of replicating digital and physical. And that's what we kind of see us doing now”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huge in the early 90s, and then it kind of teetered off as we She didn't shift into dating as much, but there are ways to connect with other people. So that was kind of the beginning of a lot of the gay blogs and gay websites, like gay.com or dan.com. They merge.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But after Ellen was created in 1997, right after Ellen came out on television because Sarah Warren was trying to find any sort of writing or community space about visibility, representation for LGBT women. It just did not exist. So she had to create her own. And then from there, there was fewer depictions of lesbians on television and film, but they kept growing. And eventually we got the Lord, which was a huge boost for after Ellen and for lesbian community and culture in general. But it was mostly about entertainment and visibility. So it started a lot of more like academic essays, but then it became TV recaps. And then it became movie reviews. And then lesbians just found it as the number one lesbian site. So then it started to open up more into lifestyle. So it really broadened with the community. What do you want women? What are you coming here for? Because there's not really any other home for you on the internet.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Planet Yeah, I remember reading Planet Out. I mean, at the time, you know, in my, yeah, I came out in 20, and I was reading the very few LGBT sites that were available and any that covered women specifically. And so that was, you know, fewer and farther between, sadly, and still sort of the case today.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm 34, so I was old enough that I was on AOL. Unfortunately, I didn't know I was gay until I was 20. So I wasn't able to capitalize on it like I should have. But I think for me, moving into my job at After Ellen, where I spent 10 years, the forums, the community were my first real foray into seeing how women met each other there. Lots of women would meet in the coming out forums and the Xena forums in very specific fandoms that they met their partners, their wives. And so to me, it seems like a direct parallel to now where we're moving into like with Grindr and all these dating apps where there's content and dating and relating to people in the same space.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say that I said that before I worked at Grindr, I was like, yeah, there's an obvious kind of culture there that gay people always lead the way, whether it's in books, media, or even hookup apps, if you want to call them that. So it is really magnificent to see it grow and people become really interested in connectivity because you're right, gay people are always looking for each other. I remember when I was in college when Grindr came out and I used it in Chicago and I went back to Nashville outside of Nashville in a smaller town and I realized that there were a lot of gay men in my town that I had no idea were there and that for me made me really excited to go home over and over. So now being a part of the company, I was like.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really is a kind of genius to it because for most communities, you would never want to let anyone know how physically close you were to anyone else. But for gay people, that's actually oftentimes like the most important thing is, are there any other gay people around me who I can talk to right now? And I do think that without Grindr, there is no tender. Like I think you can definitely see a direct connection”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a lot of the air it was. And I think gay men were the first to really use GPS technologies in this way. So this is around 2008 to 2009 when the iPhone kind of comes out and is really becoming what it is now. So you see gay men really okay with having their bodies shown on a grid and being able to be found at any moment. And a lot of it's because they assume it was just only other gay men. So it's an in-group mentality that they got used to. So there were other versions of Grindr that sort of coming out that were trying to cater to women or other gendered folks, but it was really gay men that were the most kind of successful on it and feeling the most safe around it. And then you see Tinder launch, which uses a swipe tool that doesn't show you who's as close by you. Like I'll be in my apartment sometimes. And someone says they're 82 feet away. That could be really freaky to some people. I know it's my neighbor, Joe, but it's fine. But in the beginning, that really freaked people out. And I think gay men in the beginning really were always looking for each other in close spaces and due to cruising culture and other versions of parts of queer culture. This kind of closeness was”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, a grinder is kind of the first geolocated social networking device or app rather not device. It's primarily used by gay men, but lately we were seeing a lot more folks under the queer umbrella using it. So it was the first app to really utilize a grid or cascade system to show you who's close by, who also is on the app. That probably in the beginning was just another gay man. And it works anywhere globally where you're at. So it's kind of like a real-life gator.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT