Why does science news suck so much?

I was definitely worried about my name being featured in the middle of absolute nonsense, but the experience has usually been good: very few of the journalists completely missed the mark. The "tone" didn't always match what I was trying to get across, but it was usually close to someone in the field's attitude.

There were some minor errors and a lot of them come from a surprising source: many journals believe it's unethical to show "copy" (the complete article) to a source--or sometimes anyone outside the newsroom. Some scientific terms have nuances that aren't immediately obvious to people outside the field. For example, mine distinguishes between "inhibition" of neural activity, which involves specific molecular mechanisms (GABA, mostly) and suppressing it, which could be anything. This distinction probably isn't obvious to even attentive "general" fact-checker.

Linking to anything in your article is bad, if people click on it they are not clicking on advertisements.

If its a page not often linked to by high profile websites you are endorsing it.

The target page (journal publication) might not be available to the crawler. It could be poorly formatted from a search engines perspective.

But if it isn't paywalled the article about the publication is pretty much a less specific duplicate of the page you've linked to. Which one to rank higher? The duplicate or the original? Extra points if you copy the illustrations too.

Ah, you've been using the big words now have you? These big unusual words must be important to the context of the article. The average casual reader most likely prefers English.

You put a date at the top of your article? That means it is important today but less important on every day that follows.

I'm sure I'm missing 20 other relevant "optimizations".

edit: Try imagine what happens with the news website if it is dropped from the index because it doesn't follow the SEO guidelines. Is there any hope?

It's not about people not wanting to pay, it's that the value of a single article is too small to charge money for. A single article is maybe worth a hundredth of a cent to me. There's no viable mechanism for me to pay a hundredth of a cent to a writer, just transaction fees will be more than the amount transacted.

I'm not going to pay a subscription to a site I might not ever visit again. I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every site I come across that might have a decently written article once in a while. Advertising ends up being the only viable way to "charge" a tiny fraction of a cent to readers.