Brian McNeff (foreground) and other students take a quiz in a baking and pastry class at Johnson & Wales University, which has helped to make Providence “a cookin’ city." The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

In 2006, Providence was a pretty good place to be single, according to Forbes magazine. The national business biweekly ranked Providence 20th out of the 40 largest metropolitan areas, sandwiched between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

The next year, Providence had dropped to last, 40th out of 40, right behind Cincinnati and Salt Lake City.

What had changed? Had the city’s singles all married off, or joined a convent?

The biggest difference was that Forbes, which publishes the list every year, had changed its methodology. To judge a city’s online dating scene, it stopped using the number of Match.com personals and counted how many Yahoo! Personals were listed.

Providence dropped from number 14 in the online dating category to number 40, dragging it down to the bottom spot overall and prompting a combination of surprised soul-searching and self-satisfied “I told you so’s” in the city’s blogosphere.

Lists are booming in the magazine world and on the Web. It’s hard to find a weekly or monthly magazine cover that doesn’t tout a new top 10 or top 50 list inside. And there’s a cottage industry building around the results. Depending on what magazine or Web site you catch, a city’s reputation and economy might swing along with the yearly rankings.

Providence has found its way onto lists of every type, some fitting, some bizarre, some contradictory: number 10 most “livable” city, according to MSN in 2003; number 10 most miserable city, according to Forbes in 2008; site of the number-7 best monster truck crash of all time, according to truckchamp.com. Ninth most dental visits per population, says Men’s Health magazine.

What do these rankings mean? Some experts say that the hunger for lists can mean that many are capriciously put together or employ dubious criteria. And the wildly varying swings from year to year may owe more to the industry’s need to continue to create compelling lists than any change in the subject matter.

“They’re easy on the mind, they’re easy on the eye, it’s a newsstand driver, it’s a revenue driver; heck, my magazine has been doing more of them,” said Lucia Moses, a senior editor covering the magazine industry for Mediaweek magazine. “But there’s a point of diminishing returns with these lists…. Don’t put too much stake in these things — but hey, they sell well,” she said.

In Providence and nationwide, the lists are used for more than just bragging rights. Once a major list hits the newsstand, it is often followed by a flurry of news releases: For businesses, inclusion on a list is a great marketing tool, and cities are no different.

Since the list explosion of the past decade, the rankings have become among the most effective marketing tools for Providence. The Providence-Warwick Convention and Visitors Bureau scours the Internet to find high-ranking mentions of the city.

“I think it is a growing trend — listmania if you will,” said Bureau President Martha Sheridan. “We include these rankings in a lot of our marketing materials. We don’t go out and try to campaign in these lists, but we’re certainly happy when we end up on them.”

They have worked their way into the city’s political discourse as well. When Mayor David N. Cicilline first took office, he used Providence’s appearance on various “best of” lists to help recast the city’s image and build confidence in Providence. Earlier this year, when the city was listed as one of America’s most miserable, a political opponent took it as a chance to challenge Cicilline in a City Council meeting.

Those who create the lists caution that most aren’t the kind of definitive sampling that should enter a city’s political discourse.

Bert Sperling and his company, Sperling’s Best Places, have been creating lists for magazines such as Forbes and Fortune since 1985. As magazines have realized that lists are hot sellers, more and more lists have hit the marketplace, and many are based on inadequate or misleading information.

“Some of the ones that are out there these days get awfully trivial. Like America’s drunkest cities, or the most miserable,” he said.

Some lists don’t consider enough variables, he said, and some incorporate too many.

When asked if some other list makers intentionally change the criteria every year to force different results, Sperling paused. “I’m going to take the Fifth on that one,” he said. “Let’s just say the only way you would see change like that is if they change the methodology.”

LIST MAKERS CAN change three factors to create different results, Sperling said. The source data can be changed, the scope of the study can be widened or narrowed, and the weighting of individual categories can be shifted. Change a single factor, and the results can swing drastically.

Moses said Mediaweek also tweaks the methodology of its top-10 hot magazines list from year to year. But there has to be a precision to it; tweak things too far, and the list will seem transparent.

“Yeah. We don’t want it to be same old, same old, we want to surprise, we want to get some buzz going. I’m sure that the same goes for Forbes. How many times do we want to see Wal-Mart in there? At the same time, you can’t really throw the methodology on its head.”

Forbes.com managing editor Carl Lavin said the list is one of many tools in Forbes’ storytelling shed, and yes, they are popular and bring in truckloads of feedback and comments.

“Our goal is to provide information that people cannot get anywhere else. And that means providing original analysis,” he said.

In addition to its original reporting, Forbes feels its lists meet readers’ needs by collating and explaining the tremendous volume of information that is easily available today, Lavin said.

“Any online newsroom is producing a lot of information, but also curating, intelligently aggregating information,” Lavin said.

Does the magazine change its methodologies each year to keep its lists new and fresh, and continually produce different results such as Providence’s plummet down the best cities for singles list?

“I think the articles speak for themselves,” he said.

LISTS ARE big moneymakers for the industry, Moses said. A list story is often in the works for months, and some are annually anticipated features. Advertisers can be lured on board if they think they may place well on the list.

The lists themselves can also serve as a kind of targeted advertising. Sperling’s “Most Romantic Cities for Baby Boomers” list, which ranked Providence fourth, was sponsored by the makers of Cialis, the 36-hour erectile dysfunction drug marketed at older men.

“We found the top-10 cities in the United States where romance blooms for boomers — no matter what the interruption,” said the news release announcing the list.

Mayor Cicilline has made the lists a key part of his effort to promote Providence and prove that the city is a world-class artistic and culinary designation.

He has gotten the most traction out of a list — of sorts — published by The Wall Street Journal in August 2007. Reporter Candace Jackson interviewed executives in the travel and hotel industries who labor behind the scenes to identify — and create — the next big thing in travel destinations.

The story itself didn’t mention Providence, but a graphic accompanying the article listed 10 cities that “the travel industry hopes will become hits in the coming years.” Providence was the only American city in the graphic, which included worldwide destinations such as Rwanda, Montenegro and the Seychelles.

Cicilline issued a slightly embellished news release in which he referred to The Wall Street Journal naming Providence “one of the top 10 hot spots in the world for travelers.” He has woven references to the newspaper article into his speeches for the past year.

“I carried around extra copies of that Wall Street Journal story for months,” he said.

But when the list press turns negative, Cicilline is quick to question its methodology. In January, Forbes magazine released its first “most miserable cities” list, which ranked Providence number 10, based on factors including tax load, crime, commute time and weather. Also in the top 10 were Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, which also show up on many lists of great cities.

“Sometimes you have to look at it because the factors they have used just don’t make any sense,” Cicilline said.

OTHERS HAVE been quick to point out the damage a listing like “most miserable” can do to a city.

Councilman John Lombardi, a longtime Cicilline foe, brought up the Forbes “most miserable” list at a February council meeting. Cicilline needed to refute this listing, as it could have serious financial effects on the city’s tourism and convention business, he said.

“We had a fiduciary duty to dismiss that and to retort against whatever comments were made,” Lombardi said.

A top-10 misery listing can have ramifications for a mayor’s political future as well, Lombardi said.

“I can see someone running against Cicilline and saying under his leadership Providence has been one of the 10 most miserable cities,” Lombardi said.

Cicilline may be able to console himself with a subscription to Forbes. The magazine’s 2008 best-cities-for-singles rankings should come out in the next few months, and if the experts are correct, Providence won’t stay at the bottom forever.

A list of lists

Number 4 Most Romantic City for Baby Boomers — Sperling’s Best Places, April 2006.

One of the Top Ten Little Italys in the U.S. — USA Today, October 2007.

One of the Ten Places the Travel Industry Hopes Will Become Hits — Wall Street Journal, August 2007.

One of Five “Cookin’ Cities” — AAA Car & Travel, May 2007.

America’s Number 10 Most “Miserable” City — Forbes, January 2008.

Number 15 of 25 Top Mid-Sized Arts Destinations — American Style, June 2008.

Ranked 3rd Thinnest in States with the Largest Population of Obese People — Medical News Today, August 2006.

Number 8 on List of “Greenest States” — Forbes, Oct. 17.

dbarbari@projo.com