Tech culture columnist Taylor Lorenz is leaving The Washington Post to start her own Substack publication, she announced Tuesday.
Lorenz announced that she is launching User Magazine, which intends to focus on people who are “steering tech and internet culture” and expose those who have “power on the internet,” according to her announcement. Her publication, which will arrive in subscribers’ emails 1 to 3 times a week, is intending to prove that “the real story of technology lies with its users.”
~personal news~ I’m going independent and launching my own media outlet on Substack called User Mag.
Please consider buying a yearly subscription to help me continue my work https://t.co/p0IrwAjNVS
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) October 1, 2024
The now-former Washington Post columnist said in a personal video that she no longer wants to work for a “corporate overlord” in order to break news.
“I don’t need a job at a 200-year-old institution to reach people, to break news and have an impact on the world,” Lorenz said about the matter. “The journalists that I am most inspired by today are those who have taken their voices back into their own hand. Independent content creators who challenge powerful institutions and carve out their own space in a crowded media landscape.”
Lorenz said she wants to “inspire” the world to use a “better internet,” expose “radicalization” and hold those in power to account. She intends to solely run her new publication for the time being, but said she may bring on some contributors, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“I want to do all of this without worrying about some corporate overlord and without the constraints of institutions who are, at times, more concerned about optics than they are with challenging power,” Lorenz continued. “I want to write freely and speak directly to people on YouTube, TikTok, my podcast, I want to run my silly meme pages.”
The internet does not meaningfully cover the internet and does not provide writers the freedom to fully cover it, Lorenz said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“I think also legacy institutions generally have just really struggled to cover the internet in any meaningful way, I think that they often sort of shy away from the internet,” she adds. “I write about the attention economy, and I write about the content creator industry, and I just want complete autonomy to write and do and say whatever I want, and engage a little bit more directly with my readers, with the public, when it comes to my work.”
Lorenz’s decision to leave the Post comes several weeks after senior editors launched a review into her private Instagram story that labeled President Joe Biden as a “war criminal,” NPR reported in August.
Lorenz joined The Washington Post in 2022, where she notably published an article revealing the identity and address of the popular Libs of TikTok account creator by linking to her real estate page. The article, which framed her as being anti-LGBT, also listed that she is an Orthodox Jew.
The tech columnist doubled down on the article during a 2022 interview on CNN by saying it did not reveal any personal information on the owner, who was identified as Chaya Raichik.
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Republished with permission from Daily Caller News Foundation
