Washington Post technology reporter Caroline O’Donovan, who has been covering Amazon.com and Microsoft, was among the layoffs on Wednesday.
O’Donovan joined the Post in 2022 from BuzzFeed News, where she had been a reporter since 2015. As an inaugural member of the San Francisco bureau and the award-winning tech desk, she covered labor issues in the technology industry.
In 2019, she co-authored an investigation into Amazon’s delivery network that revealed how the pressure for productivity contributed to dangerous and even deadly accidents and how Amazon uses third-party contractors to sidestep legal liability. That reporting resulted in a follow-up story co-published by BuzzFeed and ProPublica that was featured on “Frontline” and won a 2019 SABEW award.
O’Donovan joined BuzzFeed’s Inequality Desk in 2020, where she expanded her coverage to include the relationship between public schools, the pandemic and private tech companies, while continuing reporting on Amazon’s response to the pandemic and mounting pressure from organized labor.
Before joining BuzzFeed, O’Donovan was a staff writer at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, where her coverage of new models for journalism was honored by Syracuse University’s Mirror Awards. Before that, she worked as a journalist in Chicago, where she freelanced for various publications including Chicagoist, Gaper’s Block, and the Atlantic, and held a fellowship at WBEZ Chicago Public Media where she reported on everything from pedicabs to public housing.
O’Donovan graduated from the University of Chicago with a double major in political science and English.
