On Journalists as Influencers

What's really the difference these days?

Wednesday, I wrote a post about the various dramas Taylor Lorenz has found herself in over the past few weeks. Lorenz is infamous for getting into odd fights online, and I proposed a theory for why this keeps happening - that she’s stuck between the desire to be a serious journalist and the desire to be an influencer.

The post did fairly well, but also attracted criticism from Lorenz¹ (you can read her response here). Lorenz claims that the post was a gendered attack with ‘off the charts misogyny’, and that accusing her of wanting to be an influencer is akin to calling her an attention whore.

I took some time to consider this criticism seriously, and came up with a few thoughts. My first thought was that Lorenz has posted, as I’m writing these words, 433 times in the last week on X.² In the last week she’s also posted four different fully produced YouTube videos averaging more than half an hour in length, wrote two blog posts thousands of words in length, and published an article with Wired. She’s also appeared as a guest on someone else’s podcast in that time, produced episodes of her own podcast, posted dozens of times across Instagram, YouTube Shorts and TikTok, and has hundreds more posts on BlueSky and Threads that I frankly don’t have the will to count. Assuming she’s awake from 6:00am to 11:00pm every day, this all works out to something like a post every eight minutes for seventeen hours straight, every single day of the week. She is remarkably prolific, and frankly I’m very impressed by her work ethic.

I didn’t and wouldn’t call Taylor an attention whore because that would be an incredibly rude thing to do. But is the underlying point - that she seeks to be an influencer, and that she craves attention online - wrong?

My instinct is to walk away feeling that yesterday’s post was perfectly fair. It discusses the substance of the topics at hand before it gets into the personalities involved, and the claim that Taylor Lorenz loves influencers and wants to be one is both interesting and factually true. But having pondered the topic for a day, I do think there’s one part of this that I left unexplored that was unfair to Taylor. The line between being a journalist and being an influencer has been getting thinner and thinner for years, everywhere. This isn’t something that’s unique to Taylor Lorenz, and it’s worth examining in more detail.

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Journalism and influencing, on their face, would seem to be two different things. A journalist is someone sitting at a desk, doing research in order to write a hard-hitting report for a newspaper about a serious societal issue. An influencer is a guy who yells into the camera how he got ripped using BroTein Ultra Performance Mix and if you want muscles like him you should, of course, buy BroTein with promo code SWOLEPATROL for 20% off.

In practice, the boundaries aren’t nearly that clean. Influencing and journalism are part of a spectrum today. There are still people who are pure - journalists who never interact with social media, and influencers whose content is 0% related to journalism - but there are also many cases where the categories blur together. There are plenty of journalists who have giant social media presences and for whom posting tweets, TikToks and podcasts is a huge part of their job. And there are plenty of content creators who do things that are educational enough they qualify as journalism. When YouTuber Veritasium does 47 minute video about Monsanto’s hold on the agricultural industry, how is that measurably different from traditional journalism - other than the fact that a YouTuber made it?

These questions first appeared in the 2010s, partly due to the rise of social media but also because of the collapse of traditional journalism. Newspapers and magazines across the country were in steep decline - from 2005 to 2021, more than 2,000 American newspapers went out of business and the number of journalists working for newspapers fell by half. The industry was desperate for literally anything that could provide a life raft, and one obvious option was turning to social media. Maybe, if social media and the internet were decimating traditional print journalism, the solution was for journalists to post all the time and adopt the internet as their own! If you can’t beat them, join them. So journalists rushed to Twitter, founded blogs, and tried to get as much attention for their work as they could online.

We now live in a world where jobs in journalism (or writing of any kind) are so precarious that people are forced to develop a personal brand on social media to survive. Getting freelance writing jobs or getting noticed enough to be hired at a traditional publication is extremely difficult if you don’t have a large social media presence. And that inevitably means more journalists entering the territory of the influencer, scrambling for attention, and doing the kinds of things that used to separate ‘content creators’ from ‘serious journalists’. Some in the media manage to do this with grace, upholding high journalistic standards while being incredibly engaging personalities on social media. Others are prone to getting messy, starting online fights, and writing about only the most controversial and click-worthy topics.

I tend to think this development has been bad for everyone.

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What is the line between journalism and creating content? Between reporting and influencing?

Traditionally, reporters were held to rigorous standards by institutions with reputations to protect. Working at a place like The New York Times or The Washington Post carried both privilege and terror. If you cheated, if you were loose with the facts, or if you plagiarized, your career could end overnight. The system wasn’t perfect, but the fear of institutional accountability did help maintain standards.

These journalists also maintained a kind of distance from their audience. The story was never about the journalist, who kept themselves at arm’s length from the story. Their authority came from their command of the facts and their arguments, not their personality or their relationship with the readers. They had an ethical responsibility to their readers to be truthful and straightforward, even if the readers might not like the story.

Content creators and influencers have the opposite dynamic. Their authority comes from the personal, parasocial relationship they have with their audiences. Their fans don’t follow some faceless institution, they follow the influencer personally. Their responsibility to followers is tilted in the direction of ‘give them what they want’, creating the dynamics of audience capture. And because the influencer is free from institutional shackles, there are no consequences for ethical malfeasance. Want to sponsor a product and then write stories about that product? Nobody will stop you! Want to frame things in a way that’s less than truthful but more likely to get clicks? Go ahead!

Jayson Blair was forced to resign in shame from the New York Times because he was caught lying and fabricating quotes.³ If a TikTok news influencer did that today, people might yell at them… but that would only increase the amount of attention they get. Instead of exile they could pivot to being a personality persecuted by the other side, with a loyal, partisan following who will eat up that message. Playing fast and loose with the truth is, in some cases, actually good for business.

This isn’t to say that non-traditional content creators can’t do good work. Many of them do tremendous work, and I’m glad they exist. But we do lose something when the biggest source of news for Gen Z is TikTok rather than actual reporters. Disinformation flourishes on social media in a way in never did in traditional print and broadcast media.

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These distinctions are why I don’t call myself a journalist. You could call me a cultural commentator, an analyst of politics and social media, a blogger, a podcaster, or many other names. But I tend to reserve the title journalist for those who do careful work and are held to institutional standards.

I don’t envy journalists today. Far too many are placed in an impossible situation. If they don’t play the social media game they lose their best chance to do important work that grabs people’s attention and changes society. If they do play the social media game, their credibility often ends up undermined and they find themselves chasing down clickbait stories. It’s possible to walk the tightrope, but it’s hard.

At this point I’d like to turn to someone who I think often has great insight into social media dynamics and trends:

TL: I firmly believe in traditional media.

Q: Why?

TL: If we look at media that is personality-driven, CNN and television are actually a good analogy. They give shows to people, they develop them and do marketing around personalities. I think that model hasn’t been very good for journalism. The reason I work in traditional media is because there are incredible journalists who don’t have an internet presence and they do some of the best work in journalism out there. Not all journalists should have hundreds of thousands of followers. That’s why I think it’s very important to preserve those journalistic institutions, because they allow for a level of journalism that personality-based media can almost never provide.

Q: But would those journalists today need to be on social media to get a job at The New York Times or The Washington Post?

TL: It’s really frustrating, but yes, and I don’t think that’s necessarily good for journalism. I agree with the heads of traditional media who say that the reason they can do this journalistic work is that all the workers are serving a larger brand. Also, many journalists are realizing that building an audience on networks is volatile and that whatever you say about the Post or the Times, they are stable. And the reason I’m not an influencer and work in these places is because I don’t think I have to chase traffic and hits all day, and I can take three months on an investigation.

These quotes are from an April 2024 interview with Taylor Lorenz, while she still worked at the Washington Post. She bemoans the exact things we’re talking about here - how the strict standards and traditional institutions are good for journalism, and it sucks that every journalist is now expected to be on social media playing the attention game. This is something she was acutely aware of while working for the Washington Post.

Here’s a contrasting opinion:

Q: 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.

TL: 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…

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.

This quote also comes from Taylor Lorenz, but from after she was forced out of the Washington Post for violating the standards of behavior that she had previously celebrated. That interview is far more positive on influencers-as-journalists, calling them ‘liberatory’ and generally gushing about how great they are. Curious that two interviews only a year apart could have such different tones!

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Lorenz, despite her denials, is the prototypical example of a journalist who’s embraced being an influencer. She posts incessantly. She does paid endorsements. Her blog and her YouTube videos are fully independent and not held to any kind of traditional editorial standard. She’s very aware of the dynamics we’re talking about - she’s been writing about how journalism and influencing are melding together since 2018!

There’s nothing wrong with being an influencer in and of itself. Bloggers, podcasters and influencers can and should exist - I’m one of them! But the complications come when you want to succeed as both a serious journalist and an influencer, as Lorenz does. It’s a problem that many in online media face. There are whole categories of podcasters, news commentators, bloggers and YouTubers who have to uncomfortably straddle this line.

It’s likely that there’s no way to reverse this dynamic. Technology is what it is, and frankly, people demand what they demand. When there’s an announcement about who’s going to be playing the next superhero character, people don’t rush to read Reuters or some Hollywood industry rag. They rush to social media to watch a creator talk about the new casting choice (and it’s usually one who aligns with them in the culture war). But while things can’t be reversed, there are few guidelines that I think hybrid content creators/journalists should follow if they want to be respected as serious journalists:

Don’t do paid sponsorships: And if you must, certainly don’t do paid sponsorships in the area you report on. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s a pure influencer sponsoring a product they use. But it’s impossible to imagine a New York Times reporter writing a piece about shady business practices in the fast food industry, and then a week later doing a sponsored video on TikTok about how great Chipotle is. If you want trust, you can’t do things like that.

Don’t center stories around yourself: Doing journalism requires a certain level of remove from the story. You shouldn’t have pre-existing personal beef with the subjects of the story. If you routinely find your stories exploding into personality-vs-personality drama, you’re doing something wrong. And for the love of god please don’t put your own cringe influencer reaction face as the thumbnail for every video you make. The story should be about the story, not about you.

Maintain clear boundaries: Ideally, every influencer/journalist hybrid would have a clean delineation between influencer content and professional content. As an example, it’s hard to believe someone is doing good faith reporting or analysis of the Democratic party when they also post things like “For the zillionth time I’m not a Democrat or a liberal. I hate the democrats more than you people do”. Nobody can stop you from posting incendiary hot takes and engaging in bitter culture war battles online. But your reputation as a neutral, honest reporter is going to suffer if you do.

Disclose everything: If you’re getting income from more than one source, you should disclose it prominently. If you have any conflicts of interest, you should disclose them. If you have situations that aren’t actually conflicts of interest but could look that way, disclose those too just to be safe. Doing so will help you avoid accusations of being corrupt or of being hypocritical.

Admit mistakes readily: You’re going to make mistakes. Everyone does, and it’s even more likely to happen when you don’t have a team of editors and fact-checkers looking over your shoulder. When it happens, be willing and even eager to admit the mistake and correct it. It’s embarrassing in the short run, but it builds credibility in the long run.

There are journalist/influencer hybrids who are, for the most part, able to live up to these standards. There are others who clearly don’t. While I’m sympathetic to those caught between two worlds, if you want to be taken seriously you need to hold yourself to high standards. Otherwise you’ll end up lost in the sauce, posting hundreds of times a day, engaging in constant fights, and chasing virality far more than you chase the truth.

1. Sidenote - I have no idea how Lorenz found the Threads post, given that I have less than 700 followers on Threads. I suspect she name searches herself.

2. Including tweets, replies, and retweets. Yes, I actually counted.

3. A fun way to cap this point - Jayson Blair is now on Substack.