Washington Post technology reporter Caroline O’Donovan, who has covered Amazon for almost four years, was among hundreds of staffers laid off Wednesday at the Jeff Bezos-owned newspaper.
O’Donovan confirmed the news, reported by Talking Biz News and others, with a post on X.
“I’m out, along with just a ton of the best in the biz. horrible,” she wrote.
O’Donovan joined the Post in 2022 after seven years as a technology reporter at BuzzFeed. Among her work there covering Amazon, she co-authored a 2019 investigation into the tech giant’s delivery network. TBN reported that the story “revealed how the pressure for productivity contributed to dangerous and even deadly accidents and how Amazon uses third-party contractors to sidestep legal liability.” A follow-up co-published by BuzzFeed and ProPublica was featured on “Frontline” and won a 2019 SABEW award.
Before joining BuzzFeed, O’Donovan was a staff writer at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab.
In other posts on X, O’Donovan shared how surprised readers often were that the Post would cover Amazon so closely considering the Bezos tie.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that cuts at The Washington Post are impacting roughly 30 percent of all its employees, including more than 300 of roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom.
The paper is eliminating its sports and books sections, stopping its “Post Reports” daily news podcast, and shrinking metro and international coverage.
Tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler, who was also laid off, said on LinkedIn that most of the Post’s San Francisco bureau was cut.
Executive Editor Matt Murray said on a call with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long, according to the Times. In an email, he said the Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative AI, had fallen by nearly half in the last three years.
Bezos bought the Post for $250 million in 2013, and was initially a distant but supportive owner.
His influence at the newspaper came into sharper focus in recent years. In February he shook up the newspaper’s opinion pages by refocusing the section on supporting and defending what he called “two pillars” — personal liberties and free markets.
That action came in the wake of his decision in 2024 to end the newspaper’s tradition of endorsing candidates for president — including a reported spiking of the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. The move cost the Post more than 200,000 digital subscribers and a wave of backlash during the contentious run-up to Trump’s re-election.
After Trump resumed office, Bezos joined other tech leaders in expressing a willingness to work with the administration. Bezos was among those who attended the presidential inauguration.
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