The problem is (much like the rest of the economy) what passes for news media is incredibly top heavy and bloated with managers, executives, and shareholders who suck up money without providing any value.

For every journalist there are 15 managers and editors hired for nepotism reasons. The NYT is full of people like that who do nothing but trot out right wing editorials supporting whatever war the US is involved in[4] or attacking people who think the world can be a better place[3]. I used to pay for The Atlantic but for every Ed Yong writing amazing science articles there's a right wing editor like Jeffrey Goldberg[1] sucking up money and shitting out right wing propaganda[2].

This article[0]from 404 said it well.

>Then I went to work for VICE, and made working at VICE part of my identity. I wanted the company to succeed so badly because I believed in what we were doing and I believed in the institution. I worked zillions of hours of unpaid overtime, took on side projects, canceled vacations to do work, worked on vacations, and made incredibly hard decisions, thinking that, if I did my job well enough, the company would succeed and we would get to keep doing what we were doing. I spent the vast majority of that time doing work that made money for an over-bloated apparatus that existed to make a bunch of middle managers and executives large salaries and bonuses and to benefit a founder who is now retroactively denigrating our work in an attempt to cling to whatever relevancy he can find by catering to conspiracy theorists and the right.

I hope journalists leave the old right wing media like the NYT and Washington Post and start their own things focusing on journalism. I gladly pay for that.

0 https://www.404media.co/the-billionaire-is-the-threat-not-th... 1: https://fair.org/home/conspiracies-pushed-by-atlantics-edito... 2: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-198-how-the-atlan... 3: https://fair.org/home/nyts-campus-free-speech-coverage-focus... 4: https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...

You see this with the ridiculous "prompt engineering" crap that has sprung up where people are slowly reinventing programming languages but completely unspecified. Something that could be specified in 4 lines of godforesaken YAML ends up taking 40000 words of very bizarre English and using enough energy to roast a whole pig.

The point of PE isn't to run sustainable businesses that provide quality products and services for customers while treating their employees well. The point is to rapidly suck all the value out of businesses by loading them up with debt, breaking laws, mistreating customers, and exploiting employees. What happens to the carcass of the business or to the customers and employees whose lives have been destroyed doesn't matter to them.

Viruses are constantly evolving and flu can also exchange parts of its genome with other flu strains (reassortment).

It may become more (or less) virulent by chance while evolving more fitness for human bodies so past results don’t guarantee future results.