Taylor Lorenz is a pioneer of a kind of reporting that is now every reporter’s job. Before starting her own Substack newsletter User Mag in 2024, Lorenz worked as a reporter for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Atlantic, chronicling how content creators burrowed their way into the most powerful corridors of culture, technology and politics. While most traditional reporters were still turning up their noses at hype houses and podcasters, Lorenz was breaking stories about them.
Part of her notoriety lies in the fact that she pivoted to become what she reported on. Her exit into her own Substack venture after working at several august news organizations is a familiar influencer trajectory. She has shifted into both chronicler of, and participant in, the content creator economy. As with just about everyone else who partakes, Lorenz has gotten into the kind of trouble that one gets into when all of your thoughts are online for consumption.
Her 2023 book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet foresaw the power that influencers would have not just on the internet, but everywhere.
In 2025, influencers and content creators, in all of their various manifestations, are omnipresent and culture-shifting. They’re in the president ear, at the Super Bowl, on talk shows, streaming platforms, and Broadway. They have altered our language, upended entire industries, and reshaped politics in their image. (A pair of influential “manosphere” guys just interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu, for Christ’s sake.) To ignore them is to trivialize just how influential they really are.
San Francisco has seen its local influencer class enter a new public awareness. Food influencers waged war on misbehaved chefs and reached international press; the Silicon Valley excess Becca Bloom shows off on TikTok has made her a bona fide celebrity. Accordingly, it feels like a good time to check in with an expert on influencers.
This interview with Lorenz has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
In the public imagination, there's this general understanding of an influencer as being young women who live in a major metropolitan city, who post about fashion and food. I'm curious to hear your thoughts about that.
I wrote about this a lot in my book. Although the highest paid influencers are all men — actually, if you look at the top 1% of the influencer economy, it is almost exclusively men — women dominate the influencer industry because they are often shut out of traditional media markets and formats.
When the influencer economy emerged around the turn of the millennium, with the rise of blogging, mommy bloggers were the first influencers. You had women who were stuck at home with their newborn kids starting blogs and using the internet to share their experiences and actually challenge traditional media's notion of motherhood. They were really creating this new form of media that spoke to the realities of motherhood in a way that the traditional media wouldn't. And so the influencer industry has always been driven by women, but it's men who make the money in the industry, unfortunately, because of misogyny.
Because the industry was always so female-driven, it was never taken seriously, and this is why for all of the 2010s, you had these Silicon Valley men — for instance, the founders of Andreesen Horowitz — who would malign influencers. They didn't consider this form of media revolutionary or interesting because it was women doing it. You had people that tried to dismiss the labor of influencing and talk about how it's not real labor, and the industry didn't really become taken “seriously” until COVID hit. Everyone was forced online and was forced to sort of acknowledge the power that these women have and that these influencers have. A lot more men got into the industry and started making obscene amounts of money and, to this day, dominate a lot of it.
A lot of it is a lot of that stereotype around the young pretty woman. It's just these misogynistic stereotypes and the idea of like these women aren't doing real labor, you know, but if they were a man sitting in front of their computer talking about, you know, the latest iPhone all day, that's somehow seen as like more valuable because it's like ‘male-coded.’
The pandemic did prove to be an interesting shift because, you're right, TikTok became the dominant social media platform and social video became the thing. I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on influencers superseding traditional media: influencers becoming journalists and the main way that people got any sort of information.
This is a decades-long disruption in media. It goes back again, around, 25 years where you had this more digital, more distributed media environment emerging. A lot of people in tech and traditional media thought that the digital media revolution would look like print media, but digital. They were founding places like Vox or BuzzFeed, these digital media brands that were mimicking the structure and format of traditional media.
But I would argue that the real digital media revolution was the content creator industry, the influencer industry, which has emerged outside of all of that and is incredibly powerful today. I think, undeniably, the influencer world has more power than traditional media in a lot of areas. I think news and politics is sort of the last gasp; they're the last to sort of like to be replaced. But if you look at sports media, entertainment media, food, fashion, lifestyle, home, the media climate has moved completely towards personality-driven media and towards independent media. I think that that's a good thing, by the way. I think that less consolidated power is generally good.
But it's funny because, of course, this is how Trump came into power. I was at the Hilton in 2016, the night that Trump won, in the room when he won. That entire room was filled with internet influencers, online personalities, forum admins, but the traditional media was in denial at the time and they remained in denial for years and years. Kamala Harris's loss [in 2024] has made them somewhat wake up where they're like, ‘Hm, podcasters seem to have a lot of power now.’ It's like, yeah, you guys have been living under a rock for the past 20 years.
What role do influencers have in 2025? In your years of covering this, that role has shifted; it’s become more mainstreamed. Where do they stand now?
It's such a good question. I think that we're in this period where people are starting to realize that the dynamics of power have shifted and they're starting to freak out about it. That’s why I think you see a lot of hate towards influencers. It is sort of what we're seeing with things in the UK and the Online Safety Act where there's just a lot of these really dangerous restrictions.
I've been covering this a lot over the past year, but we're seeing this explosion in laws that are actually aimed at censoring journalism, but that are framed as cracking down on different parts of the influencer economy. I've written a bunch about how these ‘protect child influencer’ laws actually don't protect child influencers and, in fact, can censor local journalism.
People vote for them because they're in this moral panic about the media landscape. We're seeing things like age verification, there's 11 states right now that are thinking of passing it. There’s KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which is a horrible censorship bill in Congress right now. When you zoom out and look at them together, like they're they're aimed at giving the government more control over online speech. And I think it's a direct reaction to the liberatory nature of social media and the power dynamics uh shifting away from traditional institutional power more towards the public and more towards, like, some random girl in San Francisco that is able to amass a following and and generate their own online attention without having to go through gatekeepers. You're seeing people in power really trying to reestablish the gatekeepers and I hope that they're unsuccessful because even with all the bad stuff that comes along with the influencer industry, it’s still better than what we had before.
With the Creator Fund and TikTok moving at hyperspeed, it feels everyone is an influencer now.
The bar to entry is lower, but the bar for content creation is higher. You used to be able to just sit in front of your computer — if you look at old YouTube videos from 2009, they're just sitting in their dorms, like Tyler Oakley talking. Now you have to have camera angles, you have to like you have to have a really in-depth understanding of videography and stuff. So, it's hard.
What is the significance of independent media creation to you in 2025?
It's really important and we need to fight for it. I know that that seems counterintuitive to a lot of people because they're like, "Why should I defend a system that allows some random person to appoint themselves a food influencer?” While you might not like specific influencers, what we don't want is to recreate the system of institutional power where, frankly, a lot of unqualified people were also giving their food opinions. People like to think that, back in the ‘90s, the New York Times food critic or the Harper's Bazaar fashion critic was some highly qualified person. Often, they got that job through nepotism or privilege and the people that had access to those jobs were not necessarily more qualified than a lot of other people out there. We do want a more open and independent media landscape to challenge power. It's really important to have independent media that can reach people en masse and challenge powerful narratives. We do want to defend that system even if some of these influencers are annoying.
