Tech is a broad field. In news reporting, use of ML is ubiquitous at this point and many roles require strong technical background and development experience. Journalists are only a small part of the newsroom

Bloomberg relies on a lot of tech and engineers. Maybe not the News arm, but it’s related enough to Bloomberg that it’s worth calling it a “tech layoff”

Tech companies are like lewdness, we know them when we see them. I’m sure Maersk and Walmart rely a lot on tech and engineers, but no one is calling them tech companies.

Does it matter? The relevant part (to most of us) is whether they're laying off engineers. Almost any company is a tech company these days

Walmart is as tech as Amazon retail. There is a reason products have barcodes.

And that reason is IBM

Is it? I'd always heard Walmart was the first adopter of barcodes at scale.

EDIT: TIL -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode

On 20 October 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for "Classifying Apparatus and Method", in which they described both the linear and bull's eye printing patterns, as well as the mechanical and electronic systems needed to read the code. The patent was issued on 7 October 1952 as US Patent 2,612,994.[1] In 1951, Woodland moved to IBM and continually tried to interest IBM in developing the system. The company eventually commissioned a report on the idea, which concluded that it was both feasible and interesting, but that processing the resulting information would require equipment that was some time off in the future.

IBM offered to buy the patent, but the offer was not accepted. Philco purchased the patent in 1962 and then sold it to RCA sometime later.

Yes, but in this case it explicitly says it is not a tech layoff. So the possible relevance is denied at source.