Taylor Lorenz on Why She’s Moving to the Washington Post, What Happened at the Times, and How to Deal With Smear Campaigns

Photo by Sara Kenigsberg. Via Washington Post.

Taylor Lorenz, the star tech reporter whose coverage of internet culture brought new readers and fresh buzz to the New York Times, announced earlier this month she’s moving to the Washington Post.

“I wasn’t necessarily actively looking to leave at all,” she told me in a conversation last week for the latest episode of The Interview. “But the Post reached out and kind of offered me this dream position.”

Lorenz’s reporting on influencers, creator culture and social media trends — she’s taken readers of the Times inside Hype Houses and the “Birds Aren’t Real” movement — has earned her an enormous following online. Lorenz boasts 250,000 followers on Twitter, 180,000 followers on Instagram, and 500,000 followers on TikTok.

At the Post, Lorenz plans on expanding her coverage beyond the written word.

“[The Times is] such a big and amazing organization, and I loved the team that I was on,” she said. “But I don’t just want to write articles, I want to do a lot more.”

Her coverage has also earned her critics. Lorenz said working for the Times, an institution that has long been caught in the crossfire of partisan fights over objectivity in media, turned her into a “controversial” reporter, and invited a degree of harassment she hadn’t seen before in her career.

“I thought Jake Paul fans doxxing me would be the worst, and it’s so much worse than that,” she said.

“I cover influencers, so I have an insanely high threshold for drama and controversy,” she explained. “But what I went through at the Times was something very different. It was this super politicized type of attack aimed at really silencing the press.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson dedicated multiple segments on his prime time Fox News show to attacking Lorenz. In one, a guest suggested that her coverage of youth culture makes her “the journalism equivalent of the creeper, cruising the schoolyard.”

Such comments are a wink and a nod to QAnon, the deranged conspiracy theory that holds (roughly) that opponents of Donald Trump are all pedophiles. Lorenz said what she faced in the wake of Carlson’s segments was more like a “coordinated smear campaign” than any harassment she had previously experienced.

“The Times was just woefully unprepared for that, and remain completely unprepared for that,” Lorenz said. “As do most legacy news organizations.”

“You would think that media companies would have learned these lessons with Gamergate, but they absolutely have not,” she added. “So I’m really adamant about helping them understand it.”

Lorenz said that news organizations tend to view the reputation of their journalists as distinct and isolated from their own.

“I don’t give a shit about a statement on Twitter, to be honest, if I’m dealing with something like this,”  she said. “What I care is somebody helping manage this smear campaign and recognizing that this is hurting my reputation.”

“I don’t want to single out the Times because I actually think this is a problem across the media,” she continued. “These companies don’t really know how to deal with attacks like this. What they should be doing is reputation management for reporters and making sure that your Google results are not a cesspool, making sure that they support you privately as well as publicly, and not giving credence to bad faith actors. But they continually give credence to bad faith actors.”

While the Times prefers to address such controversies in short statements, its social media policy discourages staffers from responding themselves.

“I also think I was really cut off at the legs by the Times’s social media policy,” Lorenz said. “There were several times where me not being able to respond to things in real time actually made the situation way worse.”

Now that she’s left the Times, Lorenz is free to respond at will. This week, Lorenz posted on Twitter about a fresh smear campaign, hatched on Instagram, targeting her upcoming job at the Post.

We also discussed Lorenz’s career, and how she got into both journalism and her very peculiar beat.

Lorenz is due to start at the Post in the coming weeks. In the meantime, she’s been writing a book, Extremely Online: Gen Z, the Rise of Influencers, and the Creation of a New American Dream, due out in 2023.

“I definitely have been writing a long time about the online creator and influencer world, which is basically just users connecting at scale,” she said.

She decided to start covering creators because she found the way they were being reported on “dismissive and condescending.”

“The way media was writing about YouTubers was making me angry,” she said. “This was in the early days of YouTube world in the early 2010s, and it just was seen as this like silly thing that could never really compete with entertainment and especially in digital media, too. I felt like, you know, there was this shift happening in digital media and people weren’t taking social media seriously.”

Download the full episode here, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read more coverage of The Interview on Mediaite.