Six days of addictively skimming Buzzfeed listicles (whose uplifting final points can’t seem to redeem many articles for their irritating assumption that most twenty-somethings are incompetent degenerates) makes the thud of the Sunday New York Times sound even heavier on my kitchen table. The transition from reading “21 Things Sassy People Wish Everyone Else Understood” to “Our Thoroughly Modern Enemies: ISIS in the 21st Century” seems like a seismic shift, the similarities between these two articles beginning and ending with the numbers in their titles.

Print traditionalists claim the listicle – a medium supposedly tailored for the quickly-shrinking attention spans of young people as a replacement for in-depth journalism – has risen in popularity on the back of a dead print industry.

But is Cracked really usurping The New Yorker? No.

Buzzfeed is not a replacement for traditional print journalism the same way a book review is not a replacement for reading a novel. Few would take this scanning news-bite coverage as an end for deeper understanding of any issue. As Stephen Hull of The Huffington Post UK put it, “Most of our listicles explain an issue and act as an add-on to a meatier story that uses a traditional journalism format, whereby you can build additional content around an important issue.”

The listicle rose as a tightly-contained information format meant for low-commitment reading on smartphones – essentially, brief and structured writing for brief and structured time. Much criticism has been levied by journos angry that listicles do not aspire to the echelons of print-style reporting: “Yes, the news section [of Buzzfeed] is nice and they have done some decent reporting, but it’s sort of like McDonald’s selling salads. It is far too little, and far too late,” says Ben Cohen of The Daily Banter. And so it goes that critics complain when Buzzfeed does not boast a reputable news section, and when it does, nitpicks that the site hasn’t forced its presence onto users who are mostly looking for listicles telling them how much of a 90s kid they are.

The appeal of the listicle is this: the voice behind the writing. The writer themselves is strongly present in any list featuring their personal opinion on the top-whatever of a subject. Many listicles encourage readers to insert themselves directly into the reading process to discover, for example, which Disney Princess they’re most like. This is a striking departure from the deliberately-distancing robot-voice demanded by most print journalism, the intent being to relate stories with as little bias as possible. Just as human brains are programmed to see faces in car headlights, we are inclined to connect more with the person behind a listicle than a newspaper article, especially when that person is us.

The idea that traditional print journalism is dead echoes the similarly widespread notion that “no good music exists today” propagated by those who have never tuned their radio beyond 99.9. If the internet has given us listicles, it has also launched a growing number of independent news sites featuring hard-hitting and reputable journalism, such as Vice, Geist, and Maisonneuve.

Italian writer Umberto Eco claims the function of the listicle is “to make infinity comprehensible…and create order”, proving for the umpteenth time philosophy’s obsession with over-analysing that which was specifically created to elicit the most flighty of pleasurable interactions, the listicle’s status as the one-night-stand of the literary world wrongly shoved into contention with The Brothers Karamazov.

So if the in-depth journalism of a Globe and Mail Focus piece is the dinner of our news-reading habits, no meal would be complete without a frothy listicle that is both intensely entertaining and delightfully unsatisfying. In the end, print journalism and the list each serve their own purpose, complementing one another to the detriment of neither.

This article appeared in The Varsity here.