Taylor Lorenz. Photo by Brian Treitler.
Taylor Lorenz resigned from the Washington Post , she announced Tuesday, weeks after the tech columnist landed in hot water with the paper over a meme she posted on her Instagram that criticized President Joe Biden .
Her departure from the Post was announced in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter , in which she also revealed she is launching her own independent newsletter on Substack, User Mag .
Lorenz then announced the new venture on X, formerly Twitter, and asked her followers to “consider buying a yearly subscription to help me continue my work.”
The prominent tech journalist, who has worked at the Post and the New York Times , said in the interview that she wanted to exit legacy media in order to speak out about her reporting and the tech industry with less constraints.
“I just wanted to get out of legacy media,” Lorenz told The Hollywood Reporter . “I feel like it’s just really, really difficult to do the kind of reporting that I want to do on the internet within these kind of older institutions as a primary job. I like to have a really interactive relationship with my audience. I like to be very vocal online, obviously. And I just think all of that is really hard to do in the roles that are available at these legacy institutions.”
In a statement to Mediaite, a spokesperson for The Washington Post wrote, “We are grateful for the work Taylor has produced at The Washington Post. She has resigned to pursue a career in independent journalism, and we wish her the best.”
Taylor Lorenz did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
The Post said it was conducting an internal review after Lorenz posted a photo of Biden at the White House on her “close friends” Instagram page with a caption that read “war criminal” and a frowny face.
After the review was announced, sources close to Lorenz told Mediaite her post was a joke reference to a well known meme that had been taken out of context.
“It was 100 percent taken out of context,” a friend of Lorenz told Mediaite. “Anyone on Taylor’s ‘close friends’ list knew it was a reference to the… meme. It was a meme that had nothing to do with the Israel/Hamas War or President Biden.”
Lorenz started at the Post in 2022. The last piece she filed for the paper was published August 7.
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Taylor Lorenz Quits Washington Post to Launch Independent Venture first appeared on
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