This email started right around the time that longform internet writing became a category of its own. I sourced many of the first shared reading links from longform.org's email. Narrative nonfiction, magazine journalism, almost always seems more thoughtful and is consistently far more entertaining to read than most short-form writing. That an author sat with a subject for long enough to write about it in five thousand or more words makes the author's perspective more believable and in reading a longform piece, you sit long enough with the author's thoughts to be convinced. Online reading now, whether it's in Axios's "smart brevity" or the Times's "analysis" pieces, is more typically a whole lot shorter, with pieces conveying less information, less context, and far more in the way of how the reader should feel without showing the reader why. If you want longer pieces with more thinking to consider, you generally end up in unedited personal publications, on Substack and the like, where the author cares a whole lot and could use a whole lot of editing to make the writing intelligible.
Plus, no one has the time to read any more. The Times's homepage is full of journalists cosplaying as influencers, earnestly saying the things they've just reported out to the camera. We don't quite read as much any more, but something like two thirds of Americans listen to podcasts; the average listener listens an hour a day.
At the best, a podcast can be like those longform, edited pieces. Sometimes they are: when a relatively responsible host is interviewing a journalist or author about a topic they've researched for months or years. Most of the time, though, podcasts, at least the popular ones, aren't. It's more often that you'll have a host who knows very little talking for a whole long time about nothing. If you're after humor, this can be really fun; if you're after facts or any other kind of knowledge, you're probably in the wrong medium. Moreover, podcast hosts often seem to be reliable because of their recordings' lengths: when you've spent dozens or hundreds of hours listening to someone's voice, they are familiar to you and you tend think of them as reliable. But, as the link for today helpfully notes, they mostly are not: longform podcasts are a hot mess of untruths, half-truths, and lies.
Reading
How Podcasts Ruined America
Podcasts have become a place where wild and unproven claims spread easily without fact-checking. This has helped fuel big political scandals, like the obsession over Jeffrey Epstein, through constant speculation and conspiracy theories. As a result, podcasts have changed how people see news, often blurring the lines between truth and fiction.