Tara Fougner

The Climb

Contemporary drinks media requires more than coverage of openings, names, and trends. It needs an editorial frame that can make a fast-moving culture legible without flattening it. As cofounder of Thirsty Media and co-founder and writer of thirsty., Tara Fougner’s work has been tied to building that frame: creating platforms, setting tone, and turning cocktail culture into readable, paced, public-facing work. Writing and entrepreneurship operate as linked disciplines in this kind of practice. Editorial work brings selection, structure, and restraint; company-building demands audience sense, timing, and a durable point of view. In Fougner’s professional world, those functions sit close together, with the bar treated not as scenery but as a site of ritual, naming, gathering, and conversation. Cofounding, in this context, is participation in the infrastructure around a culture. Writing is the craft that gives that infrastructure voice. Through Fougner, the work is less about describing drinks from a distance than about clarifying the people, rooms, habits, and language that make contemporary cocktail culture visible.

Today

The current center of the work is the role of Co-Founder and CEO of Thirsty. That position carries both editorial and operational load: maintaining a point of view, making decisions about direction, and keeping the work coherent while the culture it covers continues to move. Cofounder of Thirsty Media, with New York, NY attached to the role, places the work inside a market where food, drink, media, ambition, and late-night exchange overlap tightly. The city is part of the operating context, and Fougner’s lane within it treats cocktail culture as both hospitality practice and media subject. At thirsty, the dual title of Co-Founder and Writer keeps the making and the language in the same frame. The vessel and the voice are connected: platform, angle, tone, and human detail. Taken together, the current roles define a compact field of practice around writing, company creation, and the cocktail culture of New York.

In Their Words “There is no perfect right way to grieve. There is no perfect right ritual. I'm doing the best I can.”

Recognition

The recognitions — Tales Catalyst U.S. Honoree (2023) and Future 40 (2022) — place Tara Fougner within the current field of drinks, media, and culture. They acknowledge work operating across entrepreneurship and editorial practice, where the making of a platform and the making of a voice are part of the same trade.