All Rippers and No Skippers’: How Taylor Lorenz Became Part of the Story
Since walking out on The New York Times in February, the Washington Post tech columnist has been a national news-breaking machine. But why is the conversation so often about her?
May 27, 2022 12:00 PM PDT
On May 18, The Washington Post published a breaking news story about the Biden administration’s newly created and promptly attacked Disinformation Governance Board. The board was to be led by researcher and author Nina Jankowicz, who, The Post reported, “has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral.” The Post revealed that Jankowicz was resigning from her barely three-week-old post, and the board, which had been charged with “countering misinformation related to homeland security,” was being disbanded.
On its own, the story would have made waves on both sides of the aisle in Washington. But its near-instant virality was predestined because of the journalist who reported it: The Post’s new tech columnist, Taylor Lorenz. No stranger to digital harassment, doxxing or the dangers of online celebrity, Lorenz took what could have been a basic Beltway bulletin and made it a thing.
Before the end of the day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was in the briefing room, discussing the news Lorenz had just broken. Republican leaders, too, began issuing their own statements, mostly crowing about the board’s demise. Jankowicz herself appeared on CBS News the next day, talking about her resignation.
The scoop was, for a news cycle at least, the talk of the town—just the latest in a series of stories that has made Lorenz the most scrutinized, recognized and controversial journalist on the tech beat. “She just keeps putting out bangers,” said NBC News reporter Ben Collins, her former editor at The Daily Beast. “She is all rippers and no skippers.”
Over the past decade, Lorenz has rapidly made a name for herself covering technology, especially as it pertains to creators, social media and internet trends. In the three months since she left The New York Times to join The Post, Lorenz has broken high-impact stories about Facebook’s smear campaign against TikTok, the woman behind the right-wing Libs of TikTok social media account and the White House’s Ukraine war briefings for TikTok stars (which inspired that week’s “Saturday Night Live” cold open). “She’s a scoop machine,” said her Post editor, David Malitz.
Her beat was initially dubbed “internet culture,” though Lorenz now rejects that moniker. “I hate that phrase,” she said, a tension stemming from her belief that all culture is internet culture. A number of Lorenz’s friends and colleagues use the same phrase to describe her: “extremely online.” (That is also, coincidentally, the title of her forthcoming book.) As Lorenz told me, “There is no distinction between online life and offline life.”
Not for the first time, Lorenz found herself the subject of media attention in February when she announced that she was leaving her job at The Times to become a columnist at the rival Post. Vanity Fair, New York Magazine and The Hill all covered her departure, with Lorenz lobbing some lightweight grenades at the Gray Lady on her way out the door. She told Vanity Fair that she “kind of hit a ceiling” at The Times and hoped the paper would “hopefully, you know, evolve in their ways.”
A few weeks later, she found herself in the midst of another journalism brouhaha after she referenced her personal “brand” in an Insider interview. (“I will not make that mistake again,” she told me.) Pulitzer Prize–winning Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted, “Is there something going on in the world other than the desire of some folks to get more attention?” which then prompted some skirmishing between Haberman and Lorenz, followed by more coverage about the spat.
But the potshots by journalist peers don’t come close to the flamethrower of invective Lorenz regularly receives from Fox News and its followers in the conservative media. Among the right, she’s become a symbol of the “entitled, elitist” liberal media—a regular subject of discussion on Tucker Carlson’s nightly show and on Glenn Greenwald’s sneering Substack. Just this week, former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway released a book that spends several pages lacerating Lorenz as an “unethical, childless journalist” for tweeting about her then-15-year-old daughter Claudia’s TikTok posts.
With such visibility comes dire consequences. Lorenz has been repeatedly doxxed online and harassed in person; both she and her family members have been “swatted” numerous times, with law enforcement showing up on their doorsteps. The Libs of TikTok story even prompted a conservative site, The Daily Wire, to lease a Times Square billboard, which blared in an all-caps font, “TAYLOR LORENZ DOXXED @LIBSOFTIKTOK.”
I asked Lorenz if she believed that, had another reporter written the Libs of TikTok story, it would have wound up on a Jumbotron in Times Square. “No, I know it doesn’t, because I’ve seen other people write stories like that,” she replied, raising her voice ever so slightly. “But also that’s because I don’t think they would have written the story in the way that I write it either.”
In Lorenz’s view, it’s not just the politically flammable stories that elicit such incendiary reactions, but the tenacity with which she reports them, “I think that you have to really nail them,” she said. “And when you really twist the knife in a good way in an accountability story, people are going to freak out.”
Lorenz joined The Washington Post at a delicate moment for the newsroom. Like The Times, The Post is working to formalize a policy surrounding its reporters’ use of social media. The paper had been rocked by a discrimination lawsuit filed last July by reporter Felicia Sonmez, a sexual assault survivor who was suspended in January 2020 by former Post editor Marty Baron. The suspension came after Somnez tweeted about rape allegations against Kobe Bryant shortly after his death. Though the paper is now under the leadership of its first female executive editor Sally Buzbee, the episode was still fresh in the minds of some staffers when Lorenz joined in March.
“Enter Taylor Lorenz into this powder-keg situation,” noted one person familiar with the dynamics at The Post. “Here is somebody who is empowered to use their voice on Twitter in a way that no one else has been empowered to do.” Lorenz’s social media presence, the person said, “makes people at The Post feel like there’s a double standard.”
Indeed, Lorenz’s notoriety puts her and her employer in a tough spot. “I think it’s a double-edged sword to be in a position like she’s in,” said one Times employee. On the one hand, her social media usage brings a lot of welcome attention to the Post’s reporting; on the other, management has to deploy resources to defend and protect its reporter against a never-ending stream of vitriol. “I think a lot of legacy media organizations aren’t really ready to deal with that shit,” the Times employee said.
In conversation, Lorenz sounds content with her new reporting home and the reception from her Post colleagues. She feels the paper and its leadership value both the beat she covers and the methods she uses to report on it. “The Post totally has my back and they’re great,” she said.
So far, the feeling from the top brass is mutual. Managing editor Krissah Thompson said that “there’s just a lot of excitement in the room about working with her.” Sources close to The Post say that management’s hiring of Lorenz is a promising sign of a new openness to free expression on social media. The powder keg might be less combustible under the new regime. Noted Thompson, “Part of what it means to practice journalism today is there are going to be staffers that have really large followings.”
Lorenz clearly falls into that category. Her six-figure Twitter follower count is not even her biggest audience—she has over half a million TikTok followers to go along with another 107,000 on Instagram. Lorenz has long understood the discrepancy between how she views social media and how many of her colleagues see it. “All of these old-school media people, they think of social media as a place for promotion,” she said. “That’s not what it is. It’s like being out in the real world. I’m doing reporting.”
Though Lorenz is now the poster child for being very online, growing up in Old Greenwich, Conn., she remained fairly unplugged. “In the late 90s, I really felt like the internet was for nerds and I wanted to be cool so I didn’t really spend a lot of time online, aside from AIM,” she told me. “In 1998—I just didn’t get the hype at all.”
(Lorenz declined to answer additional questions about her family life, upbringing or even her exact age—itself the subject of wild speculation on the right. She deferred questions to a Post representative, who wrote, “Taylor is extremely careful about what personal information is made public.…Things that might seem trivial can end up having serious consequences for Taylor and those connected to her.”)
She attended the University of Colorado Boulder and Hobart and William Smith Colleges, from which she graduated with a degree in political science. Fairly soon after graduation, in 2009, she started posting on Tumblr, and eventually gained a large following. It was then that she first noticed, and disapproved of, the way the mainstream press covered creators on the platform. “It was so condescending,” she told me. “People would write these snarky articles and I was like, these are actually cool people doing cool stuff on the internet and no one’s writing about it from that point of view.”
Based off her popularity on Tumblr, she got a job running social strategy for Verizon at ad agency McGarryBowen. Then, around 2010, she began meeting more journalists, sparking a career pivot. One encounter made a particular impact: “I met this guy who had just recently been hired at The New York Times and he was my age and he was a media reporter,” she said. “And I was like, OK, I actually think I know more about media than this guy.” This led her to a realization: “I should be a reporter at The New York Times!” she said, laughing, before revealing that the “guy” was CNN’s Brian Stelter. (Stelter declined to comment when reached, but apparently there are no hard feelings; Lorenz appeared on his “Reliable Sources” show and podcast last month).
For the next few years, she bounced around a variety of publications, working in social media for The Daily Mail and Business Insider and launching a video-only platform, Instant, for Time Inc. In 2016, she moved to Washington to work for The Hill, becoming a political reporter despite having never covered politics before. “Basically, I went through this breakup and I didn’t want to move to LA and I didn’t want to be in New York,” she said. “And so I moved to D.C. to cover the election.”
In 2017, Lorenz came face to face with the dangers of her new job when she was assaulted at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, getting punched in the face while delivering a livestream report. Shortly after the assault, she moved back to New York in search of a full-time tech reporter job. “I peer-pressured The Daily Beast into hiring me for literally nothing. I took a 70% pay cut,” she recalled. “I sold every belonging that I had and I moved in with a bunch of roommates in Crown Heights.”
“She was an instant hit at The Daily Beast,” said Collins, Lorenz’s editor at the publication. “She was like a rocket ship.” Collins noted that Lorenz’s beat, covering “internet culture” and creators, was something entirely new to the journalism ecosystem; she was a pioneer in what was then a “criminally undercovered” industry. Lorenz stayed at The Daily Beast for a few months before getting recruited away. “Within six months, I had four job offers from all these other outlets. I took The Atlantic,” she said. “I was there for a year and a half and then The New York Times was aggressively recruiting me.”
While at The Times, Lorenz worked on both the Style and Business desks. Her major stories included an investigation that revealed sexual assault allegations against YouTuber Jake Paul, a feature on the popular YouTube show “All Gas No Brakes” that exposed the often predatory contracts creators are forced to sign, and a piece on the first all-Black TikTok hype house.
“She would always have half a dozen ideas in her brain and she was a fast reporter,” said Pui-Wing Tam, one of Lorenz’s editors at The Times. “She was very open to ways of telling stories, ways of structuring stories, and it just made the whole process easy."
Tam referenced Lorenz’s last big Times story from December 2021, on Birds Aren’t Real, an elaborate spoof about government-controlled birds. Lorenz wrote the piece while technically on book leave and Tam recalls Lorenz calling her, excited about the idea. Then, she said, “maybe a day and a half later she had a draft.”
Lorenz was, as one Times employee put it, “a star” at the paper, and she was finally in the role she had dreamt of nearly a decade prior. Which made it all the more surprising when she decided to leave.
While Lorenz was rapidly ascending the journalism ladder, she was also becoming increasingly subject to harassment and hate from white nationalists and other extremists on the right. As her name recognition has grown, the digital onslaughts have risen in both frequency and volume.
Lorenz talked at length about the countless hate comments, rape threats and death threats she regularly receives. She’s gotten “swatted” multiple times, with police forces wrongly called to her home and that of her parents. She’s philosophical about what her parents face—she calls them “generic suburban white people,” who can comfortably reason with law enforcement when 15 police show up at their door. But she worries about other reporters who are victims of such harassment: “Think if they’re in a different neighborhood or of a different background or of a different race,” she said. “Those are the stakes for the journalists that are trying to cover this.”
The abuse has been so constant it’s become almost routine. “It’s the same: doxxed on Kiwi Farms [and] 4Chan, Reddit thread about your family, family and friends get swatted, you get swatted, they leak your phone number,” she said. “I feel like I’m on the merry-go-round for the 20th time.”
All of which begs the question, why is the right so obsessed with Lorenz? There’s certainly no shortage of journalists covering the digital misinformation and attention economy beats. And though Lorenz is highly visible, making frequent cable news appearances and recording widely watched TikTok livestreams, she’s far from the only media millennial who airs her thoughts and opinions on social media.
Elizabeth Spiers, founding editor of Gawker and a current New York Times contributing writer, supposes that the initial backlash against Lorenz, beginning with people in the tech industry (Spiers cites pointed insults from former Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan in particular), stemmed from her age and gender. “I feel like they thought Taylor would be a vulnerable target because she’s a woman. She’s in their perception young, though she’s been in the industry for a while,” Spiers said. “And also because she was on a culture beat in the Style section… they could paint her as essentially unserious in a kind of misogynistic way.”
As for the Fox News fascination? “Tucker [Carlson] is a nihilist. He’ll latch on to whatever his producers tell him people are going crazy about online,” Spiers said. “I don’t think he has any principled reason for picking on her.”
What must be said about Lorenz, though, is that she does not turn the other cheek to trolling. She often reposts and responds to the ridicule she receives, further amplifying the conversation. “I’ve told her—there are times where I’m just like, this person doesn’t really matter or this story doesn’t really matter,” said her former editor Collins. And yet, her Twitter feed is littered with her responses, often mocking, to bizarre and erroneous claims about herself. “It’s usually just because I think something’s hilarious personally,” she said. “I also try to talk about it in a way that educates newsrooms…because I’m like, ‘Hey, guys, this is what happens. Trust me, I’m fine emotionally, but you need to understand what the shape of these types of campaigns are like.’”
However, in some ways, the megawatt spotlight has made it harder to do her job. Lorenz now tells every person she interviews that they are at risk of doxxing for participating in one of her stories (as has happened multiple times). “I was working on a story with [New York Times tech reporter] Mike Isaac and Mike can go and call up a bunch of people and he doesn’t have to have a 10-minute disclaimer,” she said.
She is also keenly aware that any mistakes she makes, no matter how trivial, will be trotted out in front of a national audience. “I can’t get a correction. Ever,” she said. “Like I would be dead. I can’t fuck up. Ever. Any tiny thing is going to be blown out of proportion, so the margin for error because of that attention is just very high.”
It was in the wake of increased harassment that Lorenz decided to leave The Times. On the surface, she simply got a better offer. At The Post, Lorenz could become a columnist rather than a reporter, and, she noted, The Post gave her “more freedom” to engage with other media, like TikTok, Instagram and podcasting. “I think of myself as a multimedia journalist much more than a writer,” she told me.
But as Lorenz exited The Times, she participated in a slew of interviews in which she pointed out key differences between herself and the paper’s leadership. She cited issues in both the treatment of her beat and how the paper handled the harassment she received. “My editor at the Times [Pui-Wing Tam] was amazing and got it,” she told me. “It’s usually this midlevel managing editor—they’re from a different world and it takes a little bit more education for them to really understand what covering this beat well means, because they still think, whether they admit it or not, oh, this is just silly.”
But the blowback she gets from such “silly” coverage isn’t confined to strongly worded letters to the editor. Lorenz has taken to painstakingly documenting her online abuse and submitting physical threats to law enforcement as well as to platforms’ trust and safety channels. The work requires “hours and hours and hours of labor to document everything, to catalog everything, to have to read violent rape threats about yourself for 10 hours after work until 3 in the morning,” she said. “And you’re not getting paid for any of that because, at least at [The Times], they didn’t consider that labor as part of the job, and yet they don’t have the resources to do it themselves.”
“None of us really even knew all that she was going through,” said a Times staffer, looking back. “But she was [going through a lot] and she felt like she needed more support from the organization.”
Reading Lorenz’s most recent scoop on the Disinformation Governance Board, it can be hard to separate the reporting from the reporter. The story itself had nothing to do with Lorenz: “I never put the word ‘I’ in any of my stories—I’d rather die,” she told me. But aspects of the article eerily mirror her own abuse online and her view that her former employer was unable, or unwilling, to fully defend her.
“Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing internet apparatus operates,” Lorenz wrote. “It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.”
Despite the strafing from the right and the occasional chiding from newsroom colleagues, every journalist I spoke to for this story agreed on one thing about Lorenz—her enviable reporting prowess. “She breaks an incredible amount of news on a competitive beat,” said Drew Harwell, a Post reporter who has shared a byline with Lorenz.
Perhaps the highest praise comes from the class of younger tech reporters who’ve been rising up the ranks across publications, often molding their careers in a distinctly Lorenzian image. Many of them women under 30, these journalists cite Lorenz as one of the reasons they decided to work in media. “Having Taylor Lorenz pick up a story changed my entire life,” said Kelsey Weekman, a 27-year-old Buzzfeed News journalist, whose blog post about the word “cheugy” Lorenz cited in The Times. “Now I have a career and connections and all this other stuff that would have taken me years to get—she just gave them to me.”
Kat Tenbarge, a 24-year-old journalist covering tech and culture for NBC News, talks about a typical Taylor bump: a surge in followers and clicks every time Lorenz retweets or links one of her stories. “I would credit a lot of my early work getting recognized to her being willing to share it,” said Tenbarge, who now speaks to Lorenz on average every day. Weekman estimates that Lorenz mentors “dozens” of other journalists in this way. “Our beat’s pretty small,” she said, “and I would venture to guess there aren’t a lot of people she hasn’t talked to.”
Affirmed by the adoration of this younger generation of reporters, Lorenz made it clear that she cares very little about what the media’s old guard on the Eastern Seaboard thinks about her. “My media is not like Twitter, Brooklyn,” she told me. “What I like about [living in] L.A. is there’s actual famous people so journalists can’t think that they’re famous people, which they do in other environments.”
She may not be Hollywood famous, but she certainly is cable news famous, and so Lorenz is prepared to face down whatever conservative talking heads and their followers throw at her. “I don’t give a shit what any of these people say about me. They can make 150 million YouTube videos about me; I do not care,” she said. “I’m doing something right if they’re that upset.”
