Magazine editors love to sit around dreaming up lists. When we agree with the results, we consider them brilliant. When they make us look bad, we assume they’re deeply flawed. Either way, these lists do have an effect.

The first mentions are the hardest to get. A city the size of Des Moines doesn’t get a free pass onto many lists, because it just doesn’t sound like a serious contender for much of anything.

At least, that’s the way it used to be. But something changed.

Most likely, the political caucuses did the trick. We’d like to think that we earned our first mentions on sheer quality, but having a town full of TV satellite trucks every four years makes a big difference in the awareness level out there.

People see the intense coverage for a couple of months, and it dawns on them that Des Moines is a real place and that important things occasionally happen there.

Some of these people are magazine editors, and that leads to the breakthrough. Probably when somebody at a staff meeting says, “Let’s do something really outrageous; let’s pick some little city that our readers never would have expected.” And so Des Moines gets mentioned.

From then on, it’s part of the mix.

It gets picked eighth on a list of “Best Places for Business and Careers.” Expansion Management magazine says it’s the “Best Place to Locate a Company.”

Various writers jump on a bandwagon and tell their readers why Des Moines is a great city for women in business. The Center for Digital Government declares that it has the most technologically advanced government among cities its size. A Population Connection report gives it an A-plus as a “Kid-Friendly City.”

The moment that made us the most self-conscious was when Fast Company magazine named Des Moines the hippest city in America. We’re still not quite sure how to take that one.

Finally, all those lists led to one that really dials up the brightness on our future: Des Moines is a hot spot for jobs, according to a report from American City/Business Journals, and that opens the floodgates.

It helps draw people, who make money and go looking for ways to spend it. For a city that feels it’s ready to move up a notch on the prestige list, it doesn’t get much better than that.

As for that list that called Des Moines a terrible place for entrepreneurs, well, that one must have been deeply flawed.