The Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos is cutting hundreds of jobs – including a reporter for Amazon
Washington Post tech reporter Caroline O’Donovan, who has covered Amazon for nearly four years, was among hundreds of employees laid off Wednesday at the newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos.
O’Donovan confirmed the news, reported by Talking Biz News and others, in a post on X.
“I’m out, along with a ton of the best in the worst biz,” he wrote.
O’Donovan joined the Post in 2022 after seven years as a technology reporter at BuzzFeed. During his tenure at Amazon, he co-authored a 2019 investigation into the tech giant’s delivery network. TBN reported that the story “revealed how pressure to produce has contributed to dangerous and fatal accidents and how Amazon uses third-party contractors to avoid liability.” Follow-up co-published by BuzzFeed andProPublicawas featured on “Frontline” and won the 2019 SABEW award.
Before joining BuzzFeed, O’Donovan was a staff writer at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab.
In another post on X, O’Donovan shared how readers are often surprised that the Post will be covering Amazon so closely considering a Bezos tie.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that the layoffs at The Washington Post affect about 30 percent of its entire workforce, including more than 300 of the nearly 800 reporters in the newsroom.
The paper is eliminating its sports and literature sections, discontinuing its daily news podcast “Post Reports”, and cutting back on metro and international reporting.
Technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler, who was also laid off, said on LinkedIn that most of the Post’s San Francisco office has been cut.
Editor-in-Chief Matt Murray said in a phone call with newsroom staff that the company has lost a lot of money for a long time, according to the Times. In an email, he said the Post was “very entrenched in a different era, when we were a local print brand” and that Internet searches, in part due to the rise of artificial intelligence, have fallen by nearly half in the past three years.
Bezos bought the Post for $250 million in 2013, and was initially a distant but supportive owner.
His influence in this newspaper has become more prominent in recent years. In February he shook up the newspaper’s opinion pages by refocusing the section on supporting and defending what he called the “twin pillars” — personal liberty and free markets.
That move came after his decision in 2024 to end the newspaper’s tradition of endorsing presidential candidates — including a flurry of reports of the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. The move cost more than 200,000 digital subscribers and a wave of backlash during Trump’s re-election bid.
After Trump resumed office, Bezos joined other tech leaders in expressing a willingness to work with the administration. Bezos was one of the attendees at the presidential inauguration.
