Vox Media is Ending Its Podcast Deal with Taylor Lorenz

Vox Media is the company that own Vox, New York Magazine, The Cut, The Verge, Vulture and a bunch of other online news sites. They also have a podcast network with a bunch of shows hosted by various folks. 

Back in February, Axios reported that Taylor Lorenz was partnering with Vox Media to create a new podcast show called Power User. Lorenz was quoted in the story.

Asked why she chose Vox Media, Lorenz told Axios, “There’s a tremendous amount of support for my work at The Post, but Vox Media has a robust infrastructure in place to support my ambitions for the show, including a top-tier slate of technology and business shows and scale across video platforms.”

Obviously things did not work out well for Lorenz at the Post. She parted ways with the paper in October after an investigation found that she had posted an image of President Biden with the words “war criminal” on her Instagram and then lied about it, initially claiming it had been manufactured by someone else. In fact, it was her post and she apparently lied to her editors at the Post about it as well. That was the last straw.

Today, Semafor is reporting the deal with Vox Media was temporary and will not be renewed for next year.

Vox Media is ending its deal to distribute Taylor Lorenz’s podcast and YouTube show. The company had a short-term partnership with the high-profile tech reporter that is set to expire at the beginning of the year, Semafor has learned.

Lorenz got herself in hot water last week after suggesting that the murder of a healthcare CEO was understandable based on what insurers have done to people. 

Taylor Lorenz is celebrating the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. pic.twitter.com/FiUC4vmPbZ

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) December 5, 2024

According to Semafor, the decision by Vox Media preceded any of that. If true, they were probably thanking their lucky stars last week.

Of course there can’t be a Taylor Lorenz story without lots of drama. Lorenz has already claimed the Semafor story about her deal with Vox is wrong.

Vox did not “end its deal” with me, we are having ongoing discussions about switching up the format or doing something different with the show in early 2025 when my contact is up. which is something Vox would help me with).

— Taylor Lorenz (@taylorlorenz.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 7:10 PM

But the NY Post reports that people with knowledge of the deal confirm it is ending.

A spokesperson for Semafor hit back, saying: “As Max Tani accurately reported, Vox is ending its relationship with Taylor Lorenz in 2025. You can read that story here.”

A source with knowledge of the deal confirmed the report to The Post, adding that Lorenz’s deal will expire at the beginning of 2025.

I don’t have any inside information so I can’t say for certain what the truth is in this case. What I can say is that Taylor Lorenz has a history of lying to people including her followers on social media and her editors (as mentioned above). She has done this more than once so I’m not going to give her the benefit of the doubt. 

Also, I can also say that the podcast page for Vox Media used to list Power User as one of their offerings. You can see it was there in September by looking at this page on the Internet Archive. If you look at the page today, Power User is gone. The same is true for Taylor Lorenz herself. She used to have a page on the site complete with a photo and a short bio. Now that page is blank. So it looks to me like they are done with her.

Finally, the other thing I noticed when looking over all of this is that Power User has very few viewers on YouTube. Most episodes, including the ones that are months old at this point, don’t have 5,000 total views yet. A few episodes have more but her high water mark was 39,000 views for a single episode. Of course the show is also available as an audio podcast on Apple and other streaming sites. Maybe it’s doing better there? It’s definitely not doing well on YouTube. All that to say, maybe this was a business decision apart from any other issues with Taylor Lorenz.