What Taylor Lorenz did next

Boatloads of books have explored the founding and meteoric rise of Big Tech’s titans — platforms that have defined today’s social media information age.?

What has gone less chronicled, however, are the stories of the content creators who built the online cultures that have given these platforms their identities.?

So, last year, Taylor Lorenz, a scoop-happy but curiously polarizing reporter known for unpacking seemingly impenetrable and impalpable online trends, did something defiantly low-fi: She wrote a book.

”Extremely Online” chronicles the dawning of the content creator industry and the colossal shift it drove in our information ecosystem. Lorenz contends that much of the internet’s history has been underreported by legacy media.

“Many of these platforms were dying and content was being wiped and there was no historical record,” she says. “I came up as a blogger and some pieces I wrote from early in my career don't even exist anymore. I wanted to share that history about the user side and these content creators — essentially the power users of the platforms — and their role in shaping the internet in a form that couldn't be deleted off the web.”

Lorenz herself has a striking resume, which includes stints at The New York Times, The Atlantic and most recently The Washington Post. Yet she asserts that legacy media was never a comfortable fit for her.?

News of her recent exit from The Post was unsurprising to her followers. In forming her own independent media outlet User Mag, Lorenz is free of corporate media’s shackles. But she now also lacks the financial and institutional backing many journalists covet.

In early issues of User Mag , Lorenz continued to scrutinize and unpack internet culture narratives. She looked at Halloween, for instance, through the internet’s lens as a performative holiday where Americans play a character and document their attire, often dressing up as increasingly obscure internet references.?

The timing of Lorenz’s departure from The Post prompted speculation from media writers that her exit was not voluntary. (Both The Post and Lorenz say it was.)?

Lorenz is appalled by her status as a divisive media figure. She recounts a recent NPR show that rescinded an invitation to appear because, she was told, she is “too controversial.”?

“To frame me as so controversial is funny. OK, I cover online influence and that's what these people are desperately working to amass. But read my articles. The stuff I'm actually writing about it is, like, Skibidi toilets getting a movie deal… There is an entire industry intent on smearing me and writing about me in bad taste. But I keep getting everything that I want. So, I don't understand, when is my downfall coming?”?

Who: Taylor Lorenz?

Resume: Founder, User Mag; Tech Columnist, The Washington Post; Tech Reporter, The New York Times; Reporter, The Atlantic; Reporter, The Daily Beast; Senior Editor and Director of Emerging Platforms, The Hill.?

Here in her own words – lightly edited for space and clarity – Lorenz takes us through her journey to independent media.?

I did not intend on working in the media — I wanted to be an artist. I came into it because I graduated in the recession and had worked in retail, at a call center and as a delivery person. I was doing anything I could to try to make ends meet. I started blogging and it became an outlet for me working these shitty temp jobs. Tumblr was my gateway into everything. I got an audience there and suddenly had a bunch of people following and engaging and it was like nothing I’d experienced. I felt like I had a real voice, and I wasn't just an unemployed, broke millennial. And the media at the time was writing all this complete bullshit about the internet.?

I started working in social media strategy, but I was always just writing on top of my strategy jobs. I had multiple Snapchat shows and launched major brands on Facebook. I worked with huge advertising partners and a lot in senior levels within the digital side of the media industry. A lot of people don't know most of my work history, they only know me as a journalist. Some people have followed me literally since my like blogging days, some people just know me from my video content. Like, I ran the People Magazine's Vine account and I was on that a lot. It’s all random.?

Taking my first full time writing gig in 2017 (for The Daily Beast) was the biggest gamble of my life so far. I moved into a Crown Heights apartment with three other people and went back to an entry level salary as a writer. I had been breaking major news around all these platforms for years (before I formally stepped into the role of reporter) it's just that nobody considered my job reporting. They weren't taking my work seriously because most of my reporting was living on social platforms like Snapchat and on live streams. Until I was writing news articles, they did not consider what I was reporting. I had to take a massive pay cut to get this job title because it was the only way legacy media would recognize my work, honestly.?

In those early YouTuber days, people on these platforms were gaining audiences and nobody was really taking it seriously. The mainstream media would write these really condescending snarky articles. In 2013, when the word selfie was like the word of the year, there were endless think pieces saying if you take a selfie, you're a narcissistic psychopath.?

The New York Times recruited me aggressively because I was constantly scooping them. I was working at The Atlantic at the time. I liked it, but I was remote and had never really worked in an actual newsroom. So, it was (appealing). That was in 2019. Then 2020 hit and I ended up moving to LA… The big thing with The Times is that they don't let you do any outside projects. If you work there, it’s like they own you. I couldn't do my podcast or my YouTube or the other stuff I like to do. So ultimately that was really restricting, even though I loved working there. I think that they have a weird relationship with their talent. Like, this is a constant problem for them. But the good thing about the Times is you can literally work there forever. But that's not what I wanted. I love the people there but they're not good at covering the internet. They never really replaced me.?

At the time I left The Times, I was already thinking about going independent. But The Washington Post also began recruiting me aggressively and there were people I really wanted to work with there, especially Drew Harwell, a journalist I’d been obsessed with and one of the few who really understands the internet. So, I decided to go to The Post for a little while. They made me a columnist which means you're not subject to their social media policy and can have opinions and work on outside projects. I was working for Mark Seibel, who is the most iconic editor aside from Pui-Wing Tam, my editor at The Times. The reason I left is because Mark retired. It makes it tough, especially if you have a great partner. When he retired, Drew and I got broken up. The same week, there were a lot of Post leadership changes. I was ready to go independent.

I spent all summer talking to people, making a business plan, building out the brand identity for User Mag. I also had a month-long vacation in Italy I had planned forever. So I didn't want to quit before taking that trip because I felt I’d worked so hard and was about to lose my (benefits). My plan was to take this vacation and then put in my notice, which is what I ended up doing. All of this was completely public, this was not a secret, I talked about it all summer. Because everything I do is covered through the lens of controversy, it's like, oh, ‘Taylor Quitter’.

I've called Biden and multiple presidents war criminals and I'm very anti-war — I've been that way my entire career. So, I don't know why there was this outrage . A huge part of what I cover is smear campaigns against women. It's these old male media reporters... News organizations don't protect their female journalists from it at all. They don't know what to do. That’s a huge thing. But guess what, everything I do is covered through that lens. One big thing that made me really want to go independent is being able to speak for myself because every time some manufactured controversy happens, I can just respond now. The way to mitigate this stuff is to speak for myself.??

I don't think people understand the extent of the smear campaign that I dealt with. It's not mean comments online. There have been huge bot networks deployed against me. When I joined The Washington Post, somebody paid a bot to send thousands of messages to everyone that followed the Washington Post and smeared me. They set up a network of thousands of profiles on Instagram to DM anybody that followed The Post. I've been baselessly sued for defamation by right-wing groups. It just ends up creating more controversy and that's the whole goal of these campaigns, to smear women as controversial.

I've had SEO campaigns run against me and entire websites dedicated to smearing me. Not to mention the effect on my family, who have been targeted along with my friends. My family members have been Swatted, somebody was also paying people to follow me around in my neighborhood and photograph and surveil me. It's incomprehensible to normal people. They just see a headline about me and believe it. So, it's not just tweets online… I don't care about any of that. It's just beyond the pale.

Legacy media wants to be the arbiter of facts and information and the ones that come down from the ivory tower and tell the masses what the news of the day is or how to look at an issue. But they have a sexist, racist and very biased view. It was an upper-middle class white man audience and point of view that was reflected. Part of the reason that they've made themselves irrelevant is because they've refused to cater to a younger, more diverse audience. They have refused to cultivate their audience and change their ways. It's regressive and out of touch.??

The best part about my beat is that it is so quickly evolving. I am ultimately a techno optimist. I really do love technology and love to cover it. I'm very excited to see innovation in certain ways. But also, we have a really messed up tech ecosystem where there's so many bad actors also involved and trying to exploit people. The beat is so open ended.?

Do I have a time where I have no devices on at all? No. I remember life before the internet and it was terrible and lonely and isolating and I don't want to go back to that. I try to spend time in places that make me happy. I got really into Fortnite for a while, and I spend a lot of time on Discord servers with my friends. I consider that restorative, I guess. I hate the concept that all screen time is bad. It's like, what are you doing on the screen? You can be having a meaningful Facetime with your friend on a screen, you know, but you can also be getting into bad shit. I have severe ADHD. I used to try to make myself stay with these schedules and it just never works. Sometimes I'll be off social media for four hours because I'm making a video or something and like, that's time well spent. But I'm not just going to like, log off for the sake of logging off because I just don't think it does anything.?

I think Tiktok's about to get banned. I don't see that court case going well for them. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't have faith in it. It’s depressing because there's no reason to ban TikTok. It's based on lobbying and a sort of moral panic around the content young people are consuming there. TikTok was sort of like a merging of Twitter and YouTube because there's a lot of discovery and internal virality… I do think it is a transformative piece of technology. It set the blueprint to the next stage of social.?

So much is changing right now especially with the automation of content and the rise of generative AI. All of that is going to end up re-upping the landscape and I think we're going to have a lot more or a completely new set of content driven platforms. Right now, there are functionalities that we don't have in the US on TikTok. Like, they're leaning harder into e-commerce. The blending of social platforms and ecommerce and live videos, especially like in Asia, is so much more ahead of where we are. We'll get there in a couple of years. I don't know how TikTok will evolve their product in the US, but I do think that they have one of the best product teams in the world and it will remain a major platform if it isn't banned.?

You can tell so much about where we are in society through horror and through things like Halloween where it's about tapping into people's fears. You see a lot more fictionalized horror content around technology and the role technology plays in our lives and AI and things like that, like, especially in recent years. I think it's just like this manifestation of people recognizing that the internet plays its massive role in our lives and we kind of almost can't extract ourselves from it at any point