Bridget Foley’s Diary: It’s All Relative, Words and Numbers Included

Click, click, click. Media loves a list. Countless outlets publish lists, WWD included. At their most purposeful and successful, lists are pithy and buzzy with a splash of controversial. And you don’t need to be an analytics wiz to know that pith + buzz + controversy = click, click, click. Yet, while lists are very much a digital media-age sport, they are by no means its creation. John B. Fairchild started W magazine’s “In and Out” list in the Seventies. I’m not saying he invented the snarky editorial list; I don’t know who did. Other titles have long-published lists: Vanity Fair, the International Best Dressed List; Forbes, a range of “Most Powerful” and “Rich” lists, and let’s not forget that infamous trigger of high schooler anxiety and post-graduate insecurity, U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Colleges” rankings. What’s not to love about a published list? At the risk of sounding grand, the blatant disregard for accuracy. I don’t mean getting the essential facts right in the traditional journalistic sense; most lists, the fun ones, are subjective litanies ripe for debate and disagreement, intended to please some people and get a rise out of others. I learned that early on, given the stir W’s

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