Journalist Taylor Lorenz Talks Gamergate, Going Independent, and Leaving Legacy Media

https://www.readtpa.com/p/journalist-taylor-lorenz-talks-going

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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.

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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...