Listicle

Listicle is a portmanteau word, a conflation of the terms list and article. It is generally used in journalism and blogging to refer to short-form writing that uses a list as its thematic structure, but is fleshed out with sufficient verbiage to be published as an article. A typical listicle will prominently feature a cardinal number in its title, such as "10 Ways to Warm Up Your Bedroom in Winter", or "25 Hairstyles of the Last Hundred Years" ,  with subsequent subheadings within the text itself reflecting this schema.

There are three primary subgenres of listicles:

A ranked one (such as Rolling Stone's "The 100 Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years") implies a qualitative judgement, conveyed by the order of the topics within the text. These are often presented in countdown order, with the "Number One" item actually being the last in the sequence.

A thematic listicle imparts no such values, instead presenting the topics in whatever order the writer and/or editor deems appropriate.

A random one reflects no structure whatsoever; instead, it embraces an eclectic aesthetic, inviting the reader to assemble one's own conclusions from an array of disparate facts.

While conventional reportage and essay writing often require the careful crafting of narrative flow, the building-block nature of the listicle lends itself to more rapid production. It can also be a means of "recycling" information, as often it is the context, not the content, that is original. For example, a listicle of "Letterman’s 9 Most Hilariously Awkward Moments" can be constructed by adding captions to YouTube clips. For these reasons the form has come under criticism as a “kind of cheap content-creation” :

It's so easy you wonder why everyone doesn't do it until you realize that now it's all they do: Come up with an idea ("Top 10 Worst [X]") on the L train ride to the office that morning, [and] slap together 10 (or 25, or 100) cultural artifacts ripe for the kind of snarky working over that won't actually tax you at all as a writer/thinker.

The blogger/technologist Anil Dash has also disparaged the proliferation of listicles, particularly within the blogosphere:

Digg and delicious and the rest are littered with Top 10s and geek equivalents of Cosmo coverlines. It's not long until we get "21 Ubuntu Install Tips That Will Drive Him Crazy In Bed!"

Nevertheless, the form remains a mainstay of the newsstand and the web. The covers of magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Men’s Journal regularly sport at least one, if not several listicles (see image above). In 2009, postings in the format “25 Random Things About Me" became an internet phenomenon, starting on Facebook but spreading to the broader web, attracting considerable media coverage in the process . The website Gawker uses "Listicle" as a regular content category. Some websites, such as Listicles.com and Listverse, are devoted almost entirely to the listicle format.