Lecture 2 How Listicles Can Drive Readership - Recap

THE ART OF THE LISTICLE



Listicles and Charticles and Clickbait, Oh, my!

This definitely was not part of your grandfather’s lexicon. But, in the social-media age, these nouns are ones journalists everywhere increasingly are going to have to get their heads around.

(For the record, a Charticle is a combination of text and images or graphics, while Clickbait is a term used perjoratively to describe content deployed to encourage people to click to a particular webpage and boost online traffic.)

This article focuses on the Listicle which essentially is the use of lists to tell a story. As in, The 7 Best Cappuccino Places in Vancouver. The 5 Worst Traffic Intersections in Surrey. The 9 Top-Spending MLAs in Victoria. (For some reason, odd numbers are believed to attract more readers than even ones, according to research.)

Now, there really is nothing new about the use of lists in journalism. Newspapers have been running sidebars to summarize, and list, facts and ideas forever. The newfangled term Listicle, however, came into being courtesy of online websites, largely popularized by Buzzfeed. Listicles have helped make lists all the rage in journalism.

Widely used by bloggers, such lists are both praised — and denigrated, especially by veteran scribes.

The critics argue, they are a quick and dirty way to create content that tends to be more superficial than substantive The word, appropriately, sounds like Popsicle — fun, easy to consume, empty calories.

On her GirlvsGlobe blog from Scotland, ‘Sabina’ notes that, with listicles, “all the content is conveniently chopped into tiny pieces your brain can swallow whole, like a family-sized bag of chips you mindlessly devour while watching Netflix.

“Why spend days crafting a masterpiece when you can put together a listicle in a few hours? A listicle which, generally speaking, will attract more readers than the aforementioned masterpiece.”

And here’s a tidbit of candour from ‘Sabina’: “I’ll be honest. I write listicles to increase trafflic. Blogging is my full time job and my income partly depends on how many readers I have.”

This is where listicles, with their easy-to-imbibe attributes, have value as clickbait. And newspapers have been deploying them, like everyone else, to drive online traffic.

Lists may be overused these days but they have their place in journalism, argues blogger Rachel Edidin, writing on wired.com.

“They are not a substitute for long-form reporting, nor is long-form reporting a substitute for lists. They are different formats, suited to different subjects and different ends. Form follows function – you don’t write a eulogy on the back of a receipt and you don’t bring a 1,000 word essay to the grocery store.”

Indeed many believe lists are incredibly useful as just one more tool in the storytelling kit, no more nor less legitimate a tool than any other.

Jo Christy, a blogger in Cambridge England, defends the lowly listicle. “Just because a blogger or writer is creating a list, rather than a 2,000-word feature, it does not mean that it is bad quality or lazy content creation. It still takes expertise and knowledge of the topic to educate the reader. It can still take lots of time to put together.”

Christy makes a legitimate point. Listicles can deal with weighty subjects.

For example, interviews with ordinary Vancouverites about their top concerns regarding approval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline could reveal a variety of interesting responses, related to pipeline spills, tanker mishaps, coast guard inadequacies or climate-change concerns. These public views could conceivably be presented as a listicle rather than as part of regular text, arguably making them easier to read.

The truth is that. in the digital era, younger consumers of journalism tend to be ‘news snackers’ – preferring to read small tidbits of news from a variety of online sources frequently throughout the day. The listicle also is ideal for those who consume news by scanning their mobile devices.

The listicle is pretty basic. It is topped by a headline, with numbered subheads appearing below. Use of words like You and My work well in blogging-style listicles. In more substantive listicles, each subhead may then feature two or three paragraphs of elaboration. It is hard to argue with the notion that this is a good, practical way to clearly organize information on a page.

A listicle, more broadly, can creatively morph into an attractive stand-alone graphic, as The Globe and Mail newspaper demonstrates in what it labels “a visualization.” https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-globe-and-mail-bc-edition/20170218/281814283625325

The Report on Business feature, against the backdrop of a map, listed total tourist arrivals to the Caribbean in 2016, with Canada assuming second spot, after the U.S., among 6 tourist-origination areas.

The visualization also broke down the total number of tourists to each island from the various places.

This would have been cumbersome to present as a text-only story.

Lists help the reader to decode complex topics by spatially providing a sort of skeleton of a story on which the meat, muscle and fat of the piece can hang.

Steven Poole, writing in the Guardian, finds the listicle easier to craft than a regular article, and says it is “seductive, because it promises to condense any subject into a manageable number of discrete facts or at least factoids.”

A listicle that appears as a sidebar to a longer newspaper piece can help coax the reader into tackling a heavier block of prose, if what is featured in the listicle is of interest.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, respected former managing editor of CBC Radio and a one-time Ombudsman at the Washington, D.C.-based National Public Radio, laments that digitization generally has been negative for traditional journalism.

Says Dvorkin: “If journalism in Canada, and elsewhere, is to survive, then it has to resist digital’s worst qualities — such as listicles, cat videos and celebrity sightings — in order to let the the digital culture offer what is best on behalf of the public.”

Notwithstanding Dvorkin’s reservations, as newspapers continue to migrate online – as they will – chances are good that the listicle will become an ever-more salient journalistic feature. The key will be for editors and reporters to take advantage of the ways it can be useful and not rely on listicles as fillers and clickbait.

To Recap:

• Unless you are writing a newspaper blog, do not think like an online blogger. Leave superficial listicles like 7 Ways to Break Up With Your Boyfriend and 9 Best-Ever Sex Toys to the online bloggers.
• Only use listicles where it really make sense to do so from a journalistic perspective; scrutinize your story to determine whether a sidebar list would allow the reader to better decode its more complicated material.
• Put effort into crafting a compelling headline and subheads. They can make or break a listicle.