Seven Reasons Listicles Didn’t Suck, Actually (And One Of Them May Surprise You)

“The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of Ten Best.” —H. Allen Smith.

The listicle — that staple of 2010s digital journalism — was often maligned, not least by other journalists. The format was decried as lazy, on the part of both publishers and consumers, in an age of shortening attention spans; as a killer of “real journalism,” and as “pseudo-journalism that has become a drain on our collective intelligence”; as emblematic of an era defined by vacuous, money-grabbing clickbait. In 2017, Lake Superior State University in Michigan proposed to ban the term “listicle” itself, as part of an annual “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness.” (The irony was not lost on the authors.) The Oxford English Dictionary notes that usage of the word is still “frequently disparaging.”  

These days, listicles feel like a relic of a different online age — one of scale-chasing and peppy social virality; of BuzzFeed (perhaps the pioneer of the listicle) and Upworthy — that has been superseded by today’s fractured web. They are often remembered not as journalism, or even good content, but as trash, engineered to entice users to click on a link while scrolling Facebook (something young people once did), stay on the page for as long as possible, and, preferably, share it on with family and friends. (Listicle-adjacent concepts included “listflation,” or the idea of stretching listicles to ever greater numbers of items, and the “demolisticle,” a piece of content targeted at a niche audience — Berkeley grads, say, or children of Irish parents — but primed for sharing among the communities that saw themselves represented.) As I see it, though, listicles deserve to be remembered more favorably — and may not be dead yet. Here are seven reasons why, because of course.

1. We’ve always loved lists…

It’s hard to tell when the concept of the “listicle” was born. The OED dates the first usage of the word to 2007, citing the baffling tweet: “Making poke chops and smack’n’wheeze, writing listicles.” But the idea of making lists is arguably as old as writing itself. The Ten Commandments have been namechecked as an early listicle, as have Martin Luther’s Theses (or “95 Complaints That Have the Catholic Church So Shook Right Now”) and the Bill of Rights. Nineteenth-century newspapers published viral lists (sort of); in 1977, a “Book of Lists” was a smash bestseller. In 2009, Umberto Eco helped curate a list-themed exhibition in the Louvre. “The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it,” he said. Lists have “an irresistible magic.”

2. …and clickbait is as old as time, too:

If the list is as old as writing, then sensationalism is about as old as newspapers: early periodicals in seventeenth-century England centered scurrilous tales and astrology; at the turn of the twentieth century in the U.S., the “yellow press” traded on screaming headlines, about war with Spain or life on Mars. And if listicles and other forms of clickbait have come to look like a particular phenomenon of the 2010s, today’s Internet is even more teeming with crap. In 2013, BuzzFeed, in partnership with Pepsi Next, launched a “ListiClock,” serving a unique combination of listicles for every second of the day. When I clicked on a link to the clock recently, I was rerouted to a gambling website with the very on-the-nose URL “trashfamily.com.”

3. Listicles weren’t necessarily dumb:

One might argue that if lists have a venerable history, listicles were something else. A staffer at BuzzFeed once applied such a distinction to the lists on that site alone; listicles were “the lowest version of the art form” and “literally an arbitrary grouping of things,” he said, whereas lists told more of a story. (“109 Cats in Sweaters”? Listicle. “54 Reasons You Should Go To A Dog Surfing Competition Before You Die”? List.) Under this interpretation, some observers might conclude that listicles were definitionally the dregs of the list format, and rooted in a very specific period of time. But etymologically, the word “listicle” refers to little more than a list presented in article form — hardly an invention of the 2010s. And some lists referenced in the 1977 “Book of Lists” already had very 2010s titles. (“The 9 Breeds of Dog that Bite the Most”; “20 Celebrities Who’ve been Psychoanalyzed.”) Ultimately, the listicle is a broad genre — and like any genre, there have been better and worse examples of it. “Listicles are like the weather: they will happen no matter what,” Emily Temple wrote for LitHub in 2018. “They will be good or bad; people will disagree about whether they are good or bad.”

4. Listicles weren’t actually as maligned as you remember:

Lots of people did hate listicles. But as I dug back into the 2010s for this article, I found plenty of prior defenses of — or open-minded meditations on — the format, in such bien-pensant venues as The Atlantic, Wired, and Slate. (Yes, at least one of these was also written as a listicle.) In 2015, writers at the New York Times defended listicles on at least two separate occasions, albeit, in one case, as a “candy bar” form of journalism that should only be consumed in moderation alongside more serious fare. Others felt that listicles could be serious themselves. In 2012, Farhad Manjoo wrote that a BuzzFeed listicle titled “25 Photos of Mitt Romney Looking Perfectly Normal” was the “most compelling political art” he’d seen in a while, and suggested that it was Pulitzer-worthy.

5. Seeking structure is good in a world of information overload…

“In a busy, troubled time, a simple list is easy to read and digest and remember.” This line also comes from the 1977 “Book of Lists” — a reminder that ours is not the first overwhelming age. Indeed, journalism has always been an exercise in helping people to digest a complicated world. (Nor is journalism alone in this: Eco once asked, “What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible,” and “to create order.”) Lists help us process new information; at a fundamental level, our brains enjoy them. Sure, there can be downsides to presenting the news in list form: itemizing details can imply that they are equally important even if they aren’t; life is, inevitably, more complex and messy than any list can capture. But these, ultimately, are pitfalls of any type of journalism.

6. …and we’re still seeking structure today:

The 2010s-style listicle might seem to have gone the way of the dodo. These days, scale-seeking, ad-supported media has gone out of fashion, as more publishers look for direct, paying relationships with readers; we are now in the age of the email newsletter, sent straight to a reader’s inbox, and the three-hour podcast, often defined by a stream-of-consciousness style of rambling that seems at odds with the snappy tightness of the list. Look closer, though, and the basic DNA of the listicle is still all around us. The Times frequently runs articles featuring, for example, five key takeaways from major news events or investigations; news sites like Axios and Semafor, with their trademark “Smart Brevity” and “Semaform” styles, don’t offer listicles per se, but do break stories down into digestible, signposted chunks. Newsletters — those that offer curated guides to the news, at least — often take the form of lists. (Oh, and the very-2010s animal-news site The Dodo is still publishing. On its homepage when I last checked: “8 Dog Brushes That Are Perfect For Short-Haired Pups.”)

7. The one that may surprise you:

I worked as a copy editor at BuzzFeed in 2017, and could swear I was told that listicles should have an odd number of items to perform better online. In researching this article, I came across many listicles with even numbers of items, including from BuzzFeed; the same staffer who differentiated between lists and listicles once described the notion that odd numbers did better as a “superstition.” Still, rules are rules. It is also, it seems, a rule that a listicle about listicles must finish with a self-referentially jokey item that makes up the numbers. So here you have it.