Listicles

Subtitle:A journalistic genre for digital media

The advent of digital media has given rise to new genres in journalism. One of these genres is the “listicle” (contraction of “list” and “article”): an article written in the form of a list, especially popular with younger readers. We have collected sixteen listicles from the American news site BuzzFeed and the Flemish news site Newsmonkey and we have analyzed their characteristics. Listicles are easy and fast to read and are suitable for display on a smartphone or tablet. They have a high entertainment value and their most important purpose seems to be to lure readers into the news site. In some cases, listicles are advertisements in disguise. Their function then is to redirect readers to commercial websites. The listicles on both BuzzFeed and Newsmonkey are very similar. The main difference is that textual elaborations on Newsmonkey are more informative, whereas on BuzzFeed they contain more personal comments from the authors.

ISBN:978-287-55869-71

Keywords:listicles, journalistic genres, (writing for) digital media