Tech’s human element: Lauren Smiley and stories from Silicon Valley’s shadows

In San Francisco's tech landscape, the veteran freelancer finds the human stories that matter.

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Feb 05, 2025

When Lauren Smiley began her career at San Francisco Weekly in 2007, she couldn't hav e predicted how thoroughly technology would reshape both her beat and her adopted city. But after more than 15 years covering the Bay Area, she has emerged as one of journalism's most astute chroniclers of how tech affects everyday lives, particularly where it intersects with crime and social change. Her 2024 Wired feature "Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia," which was shortlisted for a True Story Award, exemplifies her approach: using deeply reported stories about individuals to illuminate larger systemic issues.

A Midwest native who studied journalism at the University of Iowa before making her way to San Francisco, she’s built a career exploring the ways innovation shapes society — from surveillance and labor rights to economic inequality and whistleblower protection. From her early days churning out 4,500-word cover stories on a brutal five-week cycle at SF Weekly (what she calls “the grad school I didn’t have to pay for”) to her current role writing for outlets like Wired and The Cut, Smiley has maintained a focus on the human elements of technological change. In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Smiley about building trust with complicated sources and the challenges of narrative journalism in the tech age. —Parker Molloy

Blue text on a white background that reads “LEADING QUESTIONS”

What prompted you to get into journalism?

A note written by my high school journalism teacher, Dee Laubengayer, at the bottom of a story I’d turned in: “You’re good at this! You should be on the newspaper.” I’d secretly been hoping for such an invite, but I was a little bashful in 10th grade about writing for the entire school. I joined the staff and was hooked. It was off to the college paper at the University of Iowa, a string of feature-writing internships at newspapers, and finally to San Francisco for my first alt-weekly job.

Your July story for Wired, “Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia,” was recently shortlisted for a True Story Award. Can you walk me through how that piece came together, from initial idea to final publication?"

I spotted a press release about the indictment of Brazilian nationals who’d been creating fake accounts in the gig economy — using the identity of U.S. citizens — so that undocumented immigrants could drive for Uber and deliver for DoorDash. I’d written a bunch about the gig economy — news of fake accounts had been out there — but never reported in any detail of what this looks like up-close. I wanted to do that story.

I wrote letters to as many defendants as I could track down in New England jails. I really hoped to speak with Priscila: She was one of the ring’s two women and allegedly made the most money. (Note: It is usually not the woman who makes the most money.) Priscila was the one person who called me back.

Priscila and I pen-palled from prison for a year, me sending her about 10 questions at a time, requiring a lot of patience from both her and my editor at Wired. I cut and paste every sentence of those emails into a chronology to map out the contours of her story. Priscila’s family was maintaining her Instagram while she was in prison — their letting me in as a follower was a reporting boon: Her posts corroborated her travel and accelerating life while her account scheme had taken off. Once Priscila was finally released from prison — a surprise even to her, but I'll let you read the story about that — I visited her in Boston. She toured me around to her old haunts, and I was able to fill in the remaining reporting holes.

I went off to write, and the piece then went through edits with Wired’s brilliant Caitlin Kelly. Last, fact checking: Priscila’s preferred mode was WhatsApp voice recordings — so I’d sent her dozens, if not hundreds, of fact check queries that she replied to in little 15-second snippets while she went about her day.

Stories like Priscila’s walk a delicate line in depicting subjects as both victims of their circumstances as well as perpetrators. How do you approach that kind of moral complexity in your reporting?

First off, enthusiastically! People navigating morally or ethically complex situations may be my very favorite people to write about. It is also a very challenging pitch to the source that they should trust me to balance the good and the bad and be fair about it. People’s behavior usually makes sense to themselves, in the context of their lives, and that is what I want to explore. I think a bit like how actors talk about acting — they are there to defend that character’s point of view, not judge it. In journalism, it's more presenting the view. You do your reporting to put that view in context and make sure what they're saying jibes with other sources. (My stories read like features, but each sits atop a tall stack of public records and corroborating interviews.) Now, as people are accused of more serious behavior, or have more power, you need a different toolkit. But in Priscila's case, sticking close to her POV worked.

Priscila was a pragmatist, first needing to work under the table in the U.S. and then creating a flourishing empire to enable other immigrants to do the same. She had a lot of chutzpah. I also didn’t make excuses for her fraud. Immigrants, especially, seem to be funneled through this “victim or villain” binary — and Priscila just wasn’t going to fit into any neat box.

Your writing is very character-driven. What's the value of building stories around individual characters rather than just reporting on systems and trends? How do you identify subjects whose personal stories can effectively carry larger narratives?

Great journalism is already happening about systems and trends, and I like those as a reader, too. As a reporter, I find something enthralling about how systems translate down to a single person’s life. Priscila’s tale was an immigration and labor story in disguise. My [Atlantic] story on a porch pirate was a recidivism, citizen surveillance, and gentrification story in disguise. We experience our own life as one person; following a single person’s story is an immediately approachable story vehicle. It drives some amount of empathy. As they say, it's hard to hate up-close.

As for identifying the right person: especially in my alt-weekly days, where I was working with quick turnarounds, I would talk with a few people at first and weigh which one could best carry the story. For the fake accounts story, I identified the most active ring members from court documents. To me, Priscila — the ring’s queen in many ways, and a woman — seemed extra-interesting. It was just luck from there: She’s the person who agreed to speak.

What makes you decide a story is worth pursuing beyond its surface-level news value?

Beyond ethical gray areas, I become interested if I start wondering, upon reading a news story, “What’s it like inside that house right now?” I love stories that get inside there — translating some big event down to a family, to the person. Liz Weil’s piece on the Ghost Ship fire comes immediately to mind.

When you're deep into reporting a complex story, how do you know when you've gathered enough material to start writing?

After 18 years of doing this, I’ve honed a good sense for when I’m ready. It’s that exercise of boiling some massive, detail-laden super outline or chronology of my reporting to a concise outline that fits on one to two pages that really surfaces the contours and themes for me.

“People navigating morally or ethically complex situations may be my very favorite people to write about. It is also a very challenging pitch to the source that they should trust me to balance the good and the bad and be fair…” — Lauren Smiley

In an era of TikTok videos and shrinking attention spans, what's the continued value of deep, longform journalism? How do you make the case for taking the time to tell complex stories?

I’m more aware than ever that no one is going to stick with my long story unless it’s utterly compelling and reads like butter — without irritating writing hiccups. One of my life’s terrifying moments was sitting next to a stranger in a cafe who was reading my alt-weekly story on San Francisco nudists. I was on the edge of my seat, seeing when she’d abandon me. I remember she actually laughed to herself at one point — I’d written that piece with a lot of humor — and it was magical.

But tactically: When my editor suggests a cut, I almost always accept. If they claim something is confusing, any reader is going to agree. You have to earn the length. When you do, the value of long storytelling remains. I finally watched Perfect Days last weekend and recently read every word of Lizzie Presser’s story on a teen fentanyl dealer; try fitting the emotional resonance of those tales into an Instagram Story.

What is the best journalistic career advice you ever received?

Read. Also, find a mentor whose work you admire. Some key mentors — Nina Martin and Liz Weil here in the Bay Area come to mind — have really helped me, especially being a freelancer without the in-built colleagues of a newsroom.

What is the worst journalistic career advice you ever received?

Anybody who tries to infect me with their doomsday insecurities about freelancing will be promptly ignored. Look, the skeptics are right: It’s tough out there. For 97 percent of freelancers, it’s probably never going to pay enough without some sort of subsidizing activity. Still, I wouldn’t have made it this far if I didn’t just run through the naysaying, fingers in ears, going “Lalalala!”

What makes you hopeful for the future of journalism?

Oh man, this is by far the hardest question in this interview! Every newspaper feature department I interned at severely downsized. Every publication where I’ve been on staff is gone. I wonder when running through the fray yelling “Lalala!” won’t work anymore.

And yet! There’s still a blinding amount of great journalism happening, and still so many talented young people choosing this job. Here in San Francisco, many local publications have risen from the ashes of the ones that closed — enough to merit a New York Times feature. I’m not the business mind that’s going to save journalism. But our mission is essential, and I do have some hope that the tanking ship will right.

Tech’s human element: Lauren Smiley and stories from Silicon Valley’s shadows

In San Francisco's tech landscape, the veteran freelancer finds the human stories that matter.

Further reading and listening from Lauren Smiley

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