The Evolution Of Long-Form Media: From MySpace To Substack

There was a time when reading a full article meant sitting down with a newspaper, a magazine, or a printed essay that took longer than 30 seconds to consume. While that time did not disappear, the road to get there got a lot more complicated. To understand where long-form media is today, it helps to go back to where it all started shifting. 

“In 2000, social media received a great boost with the witnessing of many social networking sites springing up”, according to this Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship article, “This highly boosted and transformed the interaction of individuals and organizations who share common interest in music, education, movies, and friendship, based on social networking”. Starting with early social networks like SixDegrees, Friendster, MySpace, and even LinkedIn, then moving into the mobile and visual era with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, and eventually arriving at the short-form video with TikTok and the AI era we are in now. 

But MySpace, launched in 2003, was the first real cultural moment in social networking. As noted by researcher Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, MySpace was the first social media site to reach a million monthly active users, hitting that milestone around 2004, which is arguably the beginning of social media as we know it today. It gave people a place to express themselves through customizable profiles, photo sharing, and yes, a very specific song playing automatically when someone visited your page. It was also an early experiment in user-generated content and personal storytelling.

As social media grew, so did its influence on how information traveled. Facebook shifted the emphasis toward sharing links and short commentary. Twitter, launched in 2006, compressed public conversation into 140 characters. Instagram made visuals the headline. Each platform pushed content toward brevity, immediacy, and maximum shareability. 

This had a direct impact on journalism. Newsrooms began optimizing for clicks, headlines became more provocative, and longform reporting had to compete with content designed to be consumed in seconds. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, around 2,500 jobs were lost in journalism in 2024 alone in major markets, following roughly 8,000 the previous year, with outlets like the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Vox, and Axios among those affected.  The economics of attention were reshaping the industry from the inside out.

Here is the part that surprises most people: audiences never actually stopped wanting depth. According to author Geetika Rudra, despite assumptions about shrinking attention spans, top-performing YouTube videos now average 20 minutes in length, 61% of podcast listeners prefer episodes over an hour long, and the average Substack reader spends 12 minutes reading per newsletter. The appetite for substance was always there. The delivery system just needed to evolve! 

That is where platforms like Medium and Substack came in. Medium, launched in 2012, gave writers a clean, accessible space to publish essays and longform pieces without needing a personal website or a publishing deal. Substack, founded in 2017, went further by adding a subscription model that lets writers get paid directly by their readers. According to research in Journalism Practice, as of early 2024, Substack had over 20 million active subscribers, with 3 million being paid subscribers, and the platform had become a home for niche journalists and independent writers seeking influence no longer available in traditional newspapers. 

The line between journalist, writer, and content creator has blurred significantly. As reported by Jacob Granger for JournalismUK, nearly 40% of people under 30 now get their news from influencers, and traditional newsrooms are shrinking as more journalists go independent on platforms like Substack, YouTube, and TikTok.

In the end, long-form media had to find new homes and new ways to earn our attention. Social platforms taught us to scroll faster and revealed how hungry we still are for depth, nuance, and real storytelling. As readers, the invitation now is to be more intentional: to follow voices we trust, support the work that challenges and expands us, and resist the pull of an algorithm-only diet. As writers, the challenge is to meet that hunger with work that is rigorous, honest, and worth slowing down for. 

These platforms should still be tools for building lasting relationships with the people who care most about what we have to say, and long-form may be one of the few things still capable of cutting through the noise.