Listomania: the saviour of slothful journalists.(Column)
Byline: DAVID SEXTON
WHAT is the dominant journalistic form of the day? The opinion piece?
News reports?
Confessional columns?
Interviews?
Not really. Glancing through a weekend's papers and magazines reveals that the triumphant format of our times, the Platonic ideal to which all others feebly aspire, is, quite simply, the graded list.
Although some papers do still report, analyse and criticise events in the outside world, the main purpose of most features pages is to aid and abet shopping.
They tell people what they ought to be buying in order to impress other people.
There is no more emphatic way of doing this than the list.
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