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“Where’s all the Black journalists at now?” Rendy Jones, a freelance journalist, asked on X last week. He was referring to a wave of recent layoffs at CBS News, McClatchy, NBC News, Axios, and Teen Vogue, which was absorbed into Vogue. Jones is one of many in the industry who observed that these cuts have hit journalists of color in particular.

In late October, NBC disbanded all of its verticals dedicated to reporting on underrepresented groups, including Black, Asian American, Latino, and LGBTQ+ groups, as first reported by Corbin Bolies at The Wrap. Shortly after, CBS laid off nearly a hundred people as part of cost-cutting measures planned by its parent company, Paramount, following a merger with Skydance. As part of those cuts, CBS gutted its Race and Culture team and canceled its CBS Mornings Plus and CBS Evenings Plus streaming shows. Trey Sherman, a producer who was laid off from CBS Evenings Plus, posted on TikTok that every producer fired from his team was a person of color, while everyone granted an alternate role was white. A veteran producer who was also laid off and spoke to CJR on the condition of anonymity confirmed that this was true, noting that the team had more people of color than most CBS teams.

Last week, *Teen Vogue *laid off multiple people, including the only two Black women writers on staff, during its transition to Vogue. “I can confirm that the majority of today’s layoffs were women of color. there are no longer any Black women working at Teen Vogue,” Lex McMenamin, Teen Vogue’s politics editor, posted on Bluesky. McMenamin was also laid off.

Versha Sharma, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue, also stepped down. “We built a team of young Black, Asian, queer, and trans staffers, who are passionate, whip smart and consistently pushed impactful storytelling forward.… Many of them are now without jobs,” she wrote in an Instagram post on Wednesday. That same day, a group of over a dozen Condé Nast employees confronted the company’s head of human resources about the shuttering of *Teen Vogue *and other recent cuts, and four were fired as a result, Semafor’s Max Tani reported.

In an email to CJR, a spokesperson for Condé Nast wrote, “Teen Vogue has faced ongoing challenges around scale and audience reach for some time. Rather than continuing to operate independently with limited reach, bringing Teen Vogue under the Vogue umbrella allows it to tap into a larger audience, stronger distribution, and more resources.”

DEI initiatives are not a panacea. Some people of color feel that quotas and representational hiring are the wrong way to ensure a diverse workspace. The staffers laid off across these organizations were not all people of color, and there is no evidence that journalists of color were singled out for layoffs. But the elimination of verticals and positions dedicated to communities of color indicates a decisive shift in priorities at these companies away from diversity efforts. Among many other losses, this decision risks blind spots in their coverage.

It’s also a stark reversal of course from the commitments to racial and gender diversity made by these same institutions just five years ago. In 2020, NBC announced that it would push for 50 percent of its employees to be people of color and 50 percent of its employees to be women. “We’re obviously not going to undo centuries of systemic inequality overnight. But we’re not going to wait any longer to get started, and that starts today,” Cesar Conde, the chairperson of NBCUniversal, told NPR at the time. NBC did not respond to a request for an update on the status of this goal.

That same year, Paramount—then ViacomCBS—added to its website that workplace diversity was a “top priority and focus for all employees,” while also touting CBS’s Race and Culture Unit. The statement is still up. “We need to ensure that what we’re doing is durable and sustained—and not just of the moment. It’s easy for the next thing to show up, because that’s the world we live in,” Bob Bakish, the CEO at the time, said. “This is too important to get lost.”

Those words have proven short-lived. In September, Hanaa’ Tameez of Nieman Lab found that DEI efforts in journalism are in decline across the board. In the years since the George Floyd protests, Tameez noted, many newsletters and verticals that had been created to report on race, diversity, and identity have been shut down, including Politico’s The Recast, Bloomberg’s Equality newsletter, and the Washington Post’s About Us newsletter. Fewer newsrooms recruited at the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists conferences this year, and media companies are now less likely to publicly share workforce data, Tameez reported. Of the 169 race, diversity, and equality journalism roles that she identified between June 2020 and December 2024, a third are now gone.

In the background of these changes looms the chilling effect of the Trump administration, which has made clear that it views DEI efforts as illegal. In 2020, CBS set a target for unscripted reality TV programs to have casts with a racial makeup of at least 50 percent Black, Indigenous, or people of color starting with the 2021–22 broadcast season. Earlier this year, Paramount settled a lawsuit with a freelance writer for one of its programs who is represented by Stephen Miller’s America First Legal. The lawsuit alleged that the writer was denied a staff writer job because he is a heterosexual white man. As part of the settlement, America First Legal said, Paramount has stopped setting numerical goals related to race, ethnicity, or gender. The legal firm also revealed that Paramount “removed a five percent funding bonus for programs advancing DEI goals.”

Complaints about a lack of representation in news coverage are long-standing. They preceded the newsroom promises of 2020, and they will not be erased by media organizations’ going back on those promises now. Though it is too soon to say what the impact of these most recent cuts will be, many in the media are already mourning the loss of these reporters and their coverage.

Other notable stories… By CJR staff

• Tim Davie, the head of the BBC, and Deborah Turness, the head of BBC News, both resigned on Sunday. The departures came after documents leaked to The Telegraph, a right-wing newspaper, suggested that a BBC documentary edited a speech by President Trump to make him appear to encourage the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The documents also accused the network of using anti-Semitic contributors. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the BBC “purposefully dishonest” and “100 percent fake news,” and celebrated the resignations on X. Joel Simon recently wrote for CJR about the BBC’s expanded coverage in the US, which aimed to highlight “institutional commitment to impartiality.” Kevin Ponniah, the BBC’s regional director for the Americas, told Simon, “We don’t have a dog in the US political fight as an organization, and our audiences can feel that in our coverage.”
• Condé Nast fired four employees after they confronted Stan Duncan, the company’s head of human resources, outside his office about the closure of Teen Vogue. “I approached this conversation in good faith and because our other attempts to meet had gone unanswered,” Jake Lahut, a politics reporter at Wired who was one of the fired employees, told Status News. The NewsGuild declared the firings illegal and called for the employees to be reinstated.
• Jeff Yass, an American billionaire, gave $100 million to the University of Austin, a private four-year university cofounded by Bari Weiss. Yass was a significant donor to conservative PACS during the 2024 election, and he is alleged to have been a funder of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s overhaul of the judiciary starting in 2023. The University of Austin announced that, as a result of Yass’s gift, the school will never charge tuition or accept government funding. Its first class enrolled in fall 2024.
• Two Salvadoran journalists wrote for The Guardian about living in indefinite exile six months after publishing, for El Faro, a series of video interviews with gang members on their ties to President Nayib Bukele. After publication, the journalists said, the El Faro newsroom got word that the attorney general was preparing to arrest them on criminal charges. Seven El Faro journalists remain outside the country. Last month, El Salvador’s Journalists Association closed its offices and moved abroad. “The entire independent press has left the country,” a journalist told Reporters Without Borders.
• And Comedy Central announced that the network is renewing Jon Stewart’s contract as host of The Daily Show through 2026, citing strong ratings. The move is a change in direction from the cancellations plaguing other late-night shows. CBS is taking Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show off the air in May. ABC suspended* *Jimmy Kimmel Live! in September; the show was reinstated a week later. Paramount, run by David Ellison, is the parent company of Comedy Central and CBS.

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**Riddhi Setty is a Delacorte fellow at CJR. **