How are you going to do that when the audience is braindead and can't focus their attention for more than a paragraph or watch a video longer than 30s? There's just not much room for reinvention unless everything becomes a Tiktok feed.

Arstechnica did some testing, years or maybe even a decade ago, and found that most people don't even read past the first page of their multipage articles. And I imagine their audience is at least slightly above average for these sorts of things.

Newspapers have always been written under the assumption that the entire article won't be read: articles start with the most important information, and get into more detail as the article progresses.

The difference now is that we can track this for every article and every reader.

Unfortunately, a lot of times articles are kind of full of fluff, or journalists trying to add their own spin.

Partly, that's financial. If Apple makes a product announcement, most people want a link to that, but most news sources don't want you leaving the site, as that reduces ad revenue.

A significant portion of the population DOES want to read and engage with long-form content and discussions. They simply don't want it to be drivel. Traditional corporate/state journalism produces drivel. Substack is flourishing for a reason.