> where can investigative pieces that take months or years to create fit into that? They don't. The problem is, they don't fit in ANYWHERE. Nobody wants to pay

> where can investigative pieces that take months or years to create fit into that? They don't. The problem is, they don't fit in ANYWHERE. Nobody wants to pay for that, and in fact, nobody ever has. As has been documented ad infinitum at this point, serious, long form, investigative journalism has always been cross-subsidised from other revenue streams, because at no point has their been an audience willing to pay the actual cost of investigative journalism. Traditionally the funds came from advertising, particularly classified ads, but classified ad revenue died...what, over two decades ago now? Print advertisement revenue followed, the weird shift so many newspapers tried into video was an embarrassing disaster, and here we are, 20+ years of flailing later and no replacements visible. Will Substack solve this? Absolutely not. Hell, by continuing the great unbundling it might make it worse by undermining the revenue stream for the 2-3 newspapers still trying to make a go of it. Which is, ultimately, my point: Your argument seems to be "unbundling will fail, because it won't pay for the high quality journalism people want". My argument is "unbundling will succeed, because people don't want to pay for high quality journalism".