Today, Taylor Lorenz announced she was leaving the Washington Post to form her own Substack site.

“I just wanted to get out of legacy media. 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,” Lorenz tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “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.”

She's not trashing the Post by name but she is trashing the media in general. As for whether she is leaving before she got fired, that's not clear to the author of the Hollywood Reporter story.

Lorenz’s decision to leave the Post and launch her own publication comes a month after NPR reported that the newspaper planned to review an incident involving a photo she shared on her Instagram.

Lorenz says however that she has weighed going independent for a long time, and that the current moment was the right time to make the jump.

She jumped but that doesn't mean she wasn't about to be pushed. As the story notes, NPR reported in August that the Post was investigating something she put up on her Instagram. Here's a screengrab of that..

Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post calls President Biden a "war criminal" 👀👀 pic.twitter.com/ih0xWPw049

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) August 14, 2024

After this started circulating, Lorenz claimed the photo was hers but the caption had been added by someone else. NPR confirmed that was a lie. [emphasis added]

After the New York Post’s Jon Levine — a frequent critic of hers — revealed the Instagram photo caption yesterday in a tweet, Lorenz wrote back at him: “You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes.”...

Lorenz told her editors that someone else had added the caption to the photo.

NPR has obtained a screengrab of Lorenz’s actual post, which contained that caption. It was not shared with her wider Instagram audience of 143,000 followers.

Four people with direct knowledge of the private Instagram story confirmed its authenticity to NPR.

She lied to her editors. And if you've been following her career for a while, this was not the first time. Lorenz should have been fired two years ago when she badly botched a story about the Depp-Heard trial.

An editor's note was eventually added to her story but it was incorrect when it was published and two years later it is still incorrect. Contrary to the note, Lorenz hadn't contacted either YouTuber mentioned in the story prior to publication. She admitted as much herself and yet her editor seems to have come away with a different understanding, almost as if she had lied to her editors. 

I contacted the Post directly for an explanation and of course they chose not to offer one. Not long after, the Post's own media reporter, Erik Wemple asked the same question (with a link back to my story) and they wouldn't explain it to him either! They told him the editor's note would stand but added, "We won’t be able to get into what the internal discussions were." 

It was never about what the internal discussions were. It was only about what the truth was. According to the YouTuber, who is a lawyer, the editor's note is wrong. She was never contacted until after publication. But the Post wouldn't explain itself. It felt to me like the writing might be on the wall for Lorenz at that point. Lying to her editors about the Biden Instagram was the last straw.

There are other embarrassing Taylor Lorenz moments that may have played a role here. 

“Yes, I’m here to read for the part of Try-Hard, Dorm-Room-Dwelling Junior Who Gets High and Spits Knowledge for Freshmen.

“Should I just start— oh, okay, ahem: pic.twitter.com/XeU50VoiY0

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) February 21, 2023

As I said at the time, maybe someone who makes a good living at a major publication should have a bit of gratitude instead of acting like she's living in a Dickensian work house. But Lorenz has a habit of spitting on the people who paid her salary. 

Taylor Lorenz Says NYT Only Allows Right-Wing Opinions At Newspaperhttps://t.co/sRoIdCOBg5https://t.co/sRoIdCOBg5

— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) December 11, 2023

My guess is that this is exactly why the Washington Post is allowing her to claim she jumped when it seems pretty obvious she was about to be pushed out. They are hoping she won't start trashing them next. Good luck with that.