The Incredible Shrinking SEO

I've talked about this before, several times.  I do Google searches on my name, including on their "news" feed, to see how the work is propagating and how discoverable it is. Despite creating more output for more outlets than ever, my numbers keep going significantly down. Just a few short months ago, a general search would produce around 200K hits and a "News" search over 86K.

It's been going down at an accelerated rate and in large chunks. This is what I saw a moment ago:

It's not just about me and my ego. I have a legitimate interest to see how the efforts are escaping the niche and the public does, too, especially when the suppressed information is exclusive and concerns us all.

I can't explain what's going on, all I can do is observe that something is.  Anyone with knowledge of how this stuff works care to explain?