TAKE a brief look online and you can’t miss them, spreading like a virus across every corner of the internet.

Ten reasons the 90s were the best time to grow up! Fifteen celebs who looked different when they were children!

Seventeen and a half unrelated pictures we decided to put in a list for no reason!

Listicles have become a fixture of the internet over the past few years.

And they’re killing journalism.

When they first started popping up on Buzzfeed and the like they were mostly harmless, largely consisting of pictures of long-discontinued board games or toys based on cartoons that haven’t been on for three decades.

But when they proved so successful, many canny PR people and so-called journalists began to catch on that this was a way to quickly get attention.

If the only aim is to get clicks to deliver audiences to advertisers you can’t really begrudge this, but where does it leave serious, in-depth journalism?

The General Election was particularly worrying, with even supposedly ‘serious’ news sites presenting some fairly serious issues in listicle form.

Fifteen marginal seats which could decide the election! Ten baffling things Nigel Farage said! Ten pictures of Ed Miliband making funny faces! And so on.

While there’s more than enough room both online and in print for both, the tendency of serious news outlets towards easily digestible but ultimately shallow articles is deeply worrying.

Yes, it can certainly be argued that presenting news like this is an excellent way of engaging young people and those who might not otherwise be inclined to read about politics, current affairs and the like, but are these people then going to move on to read a 1,000-word article on how Labour’s election strategy failed?

Do you really want to live in a world where every single piece of news is presented in a set of bullet points with a series of ‘hilarious’ pictures? If we keep it up that’s where we’ll end up.

Maybe it’s a phase. Maybe they’ll go the same way as MySpace, vampire-based teen fiction and the members of Destiny’s Child who are not Beyoncé.

But when the day comes that The Times starts putting amusing pictures of cats in its articles and phrasing its headlines as questions, remember that I warned you.