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Transcript

Journalist Taylor Lorenz Talks Going Independent and Leaving Legacy Media

"[Legacy media outlets] are throwing journalists under the bus. They're just putting them into the right-wing media meat grinder over and over again."

Today’s newsletter is an interview with journalist

about her pivot to independent media and the launch of . Below is a full transcript. Thanks!


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Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival

Parker Molloy: All right, Taylor Lorenz is joining me today. Hey Taylor, how's it going? It is so great to finally talk to you face to face.

Taylor Lorenz: Hi, thanks for having me.

You've been consistently posting at your newsletter since July but just relaunched and rebranded as User Magazine last week. So tell me, what is User Magazine and how does it differ from other tech publications?

User Mag is a weekly tech and online culture newsletter. It's where you can find all of my reporting these days. It's a little different from what most people think of when they think of a tech news publication because I cover how people use technology. So it's less about the big tech shake-ups at Facebook's board or whatever, and more about how technology is impacting our culture, the business world, the political world, and everything around us.

I started publishing back in, I think it was the end of June or beginning of July, because that's when I made the decision to go independent. So I was trying to soft launch it back then.

I noticed that. I was like, "Taylor's posting on her newsletter again. That's cool." Just kind of out of nowhere.

When I decided to quit my job, I was like, "All right, I should sort of grease the wheels a little bit." I wanted to experiment and see how it felt to write on Substack. And I really loved it. I was very quickly looking forward to my Substack posts more than my written work for legacy media. But yeah, it's officially launched under User Magazine just this week. This is the first week that I'm publishing.

And congrats on that! You've worked at places like The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic. What made you decide to go independent, and why now?

Well, I started as independent, and I never aspired to work at any of these places ever. I don't really consider myself a traditional journalist in any capacity, nor do I ever really want to be seen as part of that industry. For people like me that started as independent bloggers, there wasn't really a way to monetize your work back then. So sort of the only career path was to leverage your blog fame into a career in traditional media.

I felt like, especially throughout the 2010s, it was such an uphill battle to get people to take the internet seriously. I don't know if you remember, but even in 2020—I was getting in a fight with someone on Substack Notes this morning about this—there were all these big-time people who were just like, "Internet culture reporting isn't real journalism. What Taylor writes about is silly." They kept calling me a TikTok journalist, which I'm proud to be called a TikTok journalist. I am a TikTok journalist.

But it was really hard to get anybody to take online culture seriously. So I felt like, well, maybe if I write for these big-name places like The New York Times and other outlets, that will sort of force these people—these institutional powers—to take the internet seriously. Ultimately, that really didn't happen. I think their hand was sort of forced by the pandemic. When COVID hit in 2020, it forced everyone to recognize the online world. Our whole world got really online in a way that they just couldn't ignore.

The media ecosystem has flipped, and now the internet, I would argue, is our default reality. So I don't really need a job at, you know, the Post or the Times or any of these old-school places for my work to be taken seriously. And that's really something that has changed significantly in the past couple of years.

For better or for worse, the internet's kind of our reality right now. Your first post after your announcement was about the Snoopy fan account political war, which I thought was great. It's something that I think some people might look at and think, "This sounds silly. This is ridiculous." But you did a really good job of tying it back to how there are a bunch of architecture-themed accounts that push these right-wing views, and why they were successful in doing so is that they slowly peppered it in.

Meanwhile, this Snoopy fan account popped up and was just like, "Here's why I'm endorsing Trump," in this lengthy tweet. It was not very subtle. For people who might look at that and think, "This is silly; why do I need to know about this?" Why is it that something like this should be on people's radars?

User Mag
The Snoopy fan account political war
Over the weekend, @snoopyweekly, a semi popular Snoopy fan account that shares a stream of uplifting and funny images of the Peanuts character Snoopy, came out in support of Trump for president…
Read more

I've always felt like these things that people write off as silly phenomena end up having dire political consequences. I talk about the content creator industry, right? People dismissed it, especially just as a bunch of silly things or people taking selfies, right? And then we see the way it's weaponized by really bad actors in the world.

I think anonymous theme accounts are kind of the same story. It's silly—you think, "Funny Snoopy," like, "Haha, Snoopy account is for Trump." But when you look at it, there's actually a lot of anonymously run, fan-driven accounts online that do slowly pepper in political messaging. As I mentioned, there's other Snoopy accounts that lean conservative already that are pushing crypto or pushing other types of conservative messaging.

I think it's just worth looking at how these fandoms can be infiltrated and co-opted, and how information spreads online. It's funny and silly, and I think we can all laugh at the Snoopy political war, but I think it also says something about the internet and our information ecosystem and online influence. Those are all things I care deeply about. That's kind of what I try to do.

I think it's really hard to get people to care about this stuff when you're too serious about it because people just don't engage. I've written so many stories about the far right, and people kind of tune out. But if you're like, "Hey, here's this funny, kind of weird, crazy thing that's happening, and it actually says something about politics or culture or business," you're sort of spoon-feeding it to them. And it makes them look differently at, I think, their own information diet.

Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for TheRetaility.com

Absolutely. I love those kinds of stories because that's the exact kind of stuff that I like to be plugged into. So that is totally me. You know, I was thinking the other day—you had a post from July; it was about the Pop Crave-ification of news. This is actually what reminded me to be like, I should ask Taylor to do an interview. It was because I saw someone who was posting a video of Chappell Roan performing at the Austin City Limits Festival and was like, "Why isn't Pop Crave covering this?"

I saw the same tweet. There's such a narrative that Pop Crave is against Chappell Roan, and I think it's not true. I don't know why Pop Crave hasn't posted about that. I feel like they eventually will or did, but I know Pop Crave has really just become the definitive news source of our time.

It's funny, you know—the way that person was talking about it was just like the way that I might tweet, like, "Why hasn't The New York Times covered something?"

Yes, right—like, "Why isn't this on CNN?"

Exactly. Which brings me to my next question: What does it mean to actually be a journalist in 2024? Is it being tied to a legacy organization? Is it being an influencer who does original reporting? What is it, and does it matter?

I've always thought of journalism as something you do, not necessarily something you are. All different types of people can practice journalism. Obviously, there's citizen journalists documenting things on the ground when disasters happen, stuff like that. There's content creators that are also journalists—I consider myself definitely part of that realm. There are people that are full-time news reporters, and I think those people love to gatekeep the journalism industry.

I would say they're often doing the least interesting work. When I look at who's doing the most innovative work in journalism, at least on my beat, it is pretty much exclusively independent journalists or people that have left legacy media to start their own thing—people like 404 Media and stuff like that. So yeah, I think of journalism as something people can do, and anybody can do it, really.

It's a wide thing. I don't think that there's just one group of people that do journalism. And I hate this idea—I was canceled a few years ago when I said that journalists have to have personal brands, which they do. I didn't make that rule; this is the internet we live in. And I think it comes with a lot of downsides, but at the same time, it comes with a lot of upsides.

You were observing it.

It's sort of always been true that journalists have been public figures, right? We're writing publicly under our names, or we're on TV or YouTube publicly with our face. So it's a very public-facing job. I think that can be really difficult, but it can also be really great and rewarding.

And on that note, in talking about that, you've talked about how platforms can kind of be weaponized against journalists as you're so public. And as someone who's been attacked pretty viciously by trolls and bad-faith actors on the internet, what could legacy media outlets be doing to protect their workers that they're not?

Well, first of all, they should stop actively harming the workers, which is what they're doing now. They are throwing journalists under the bus. They're just putting them into the right-wing media meat grinder over and over again. Not only do they fail to recognize these vicious Gamergate-style harassment campaigns. They feed them. They enable them. The legacy media is really the linchpin in these hate campaigns.

This was like the classic Gamergate playbook, right? That we see used against women with institutional power, whether it's Claudine Gay, whether it's someone like Amber Heard, whether it's a woman journalist. The point is that the playbook is always the same: it's to viciously attack, often on personal grounds, the credibility of a woman in power, frame her as controversial, and push her out of those institutional positions of power.

Legacy news organizations allow their journalists to be picked off. They allow women to be picked off, people of color to be picked off, trans people to be picked off, LGBTQ people, generally. They will just allow these hate and abuse campaigns to foment, and they'll participate in them. You see one journalist will get targeted, and the rest of the media will hop on and launder an abuse campaign against that marginalized person.

I have seen so many people driven out of the industry through this, and it's disgusting. And I want to be able to vocally call it out. And to do that, I cannot be in legacy media.

Yeah, there are those guardrails that are sometimes harmful. And I know that I've seen that happen, especially seeing that happen to you. I think it was when you were at The New York Times, towards the end of when you were there.

It was recently—it's been constant.

Well, yeah, I mean constantly. But when you were at The New York Times, if I remember, there were reporters who were liking tweets that were attacking you and stuff like that. And it was just like, come on.

Yeah, yeah. Again, that did not stop when I left The New York Times. I have dealt with this my entire career. And again, that's why I don't affiliate—I don't identify as part of the legacy media because those people have shat on me my entire career. Those are the same people liking these negative tweets about me or trying to act like every single career move I make is framed as controversial.

Like, "She left in disgrace." I'm like, "Okay, yes, according to you guys, I've left every single job in disgrace." Meanwhile, it's simply not true. I really have a lot of love, especially for the places that I've worked and the people that I've worked for—rather maybe more than the places. I'm loyal to people.

When I was an independent writer in the 2010s, these were the same people saying that online culture journalism isn't real journalism or that I'm a joke, I'm a YouTube journalist. They used to say that I was writing about YouTube, a site for cat videos. "Why does she waste her time writing about this site for cat videos?" YouTube is one of the most consequential platforms, especially in politics today.

So these are idiots. These are people that don't matter. They're living in the world—they still think it's like 1995. They've never been able to amass any sort of influence or attention on their own. Their power solely comes through working, and their platform comes from the legacy media. And so they're very loyal to it, and they're very angry at anybody that critiques it.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat. This has been great.

Thanks for letting me rant about all my pet topics.

Of course. I mean, in fairness, that's what I like to rant about too, so it works out. Well, thank you. Everyone should be sure to go subscribe to User Magazine. I will link it in this post. Just go subscribe to User Mag right now.


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