[gwern]

It takes time to report these things, you can't just bang it out overnight. In addition, breaking a preference falsification cascade can take a lot of hits: a lot of people didn't want to talk about Altman, but with every article in WSJ/NYT/WaPo revealing some more, that reluctance fades a little bit. That is how you go from a few months ago, there being nothing but a whisper here or there that Altman had been fired from YC as one of the crown jewel secrets of YC known to a handful of people, to now Paul Graham casually confirming it to the WSJ.

As for what the benefit is, the ongoing report is one benefit. If the law firm (named here for the first time, I believe) didn't know about, say, Sutskever's list of 20 incidents, well, they do now.