50 Fun Facts About Journalism

In newspaper jargon, the 'op' in op-ed, a page of outside commentary, is short for which word?

Opposite is the word, because the page traditionally ran facing the editorial page. Many readers assume it stands for opinion, which is simply what the page happens to print.

Which fictional Metropolis newspaper employs reporters Clark Kent and Lois Lane in DC's Superman comics?

The Daily Planet was called the Daily Star when Superman first appeared in 1938, with Clark Kent answering to editor George Taylor rather than Perry White.

In the old newsroom saying about what makes an event news, a man makes headlines by biting which animal?

A dog biting a man happens too often to report, the saying goes, so only the reverse counts as news. It has been credited to several editors, including British press baron Alfred Harmsworth.

Which newsroom word was used in Civil War prison camps for a boundary beyond which prisoners were shot?

Deadline named that fatal boundary at camps such as Andersonville in 1864. Its time-limit sense turned up in American newspaper jargon by 1919, for the last minute copy could go to the printer.

Which future British prime minister was captured in 1899 while covering the Boer War as a newspaper correspondent?

Winston Churchill was reporting for a London newspaper when Boers ambushed and derailed his armoured train. He escaped a Pretoria prisoner-of-war camp that December by stowing away on freight trains and hiding in a mine.

Which color names the sensationalist newspaper style of the 1890s, after a comic-strip kid printed by two rival papers?

Yellow journalism took its label from the Yellow Kid, a comic strip that one New York paper poached from another as the two fought for readers.

Which newspaper's reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued the Watergate story that toppled President Nixon?

The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for the coverage, after executive editor Ben Bradlee put the paper's reputation and resources behind the two reporters.

Which reporter feigned insanity to expose a New York asylum in 1887, then circled the world in 72 days?

Nellie Bly was the pen name of Elizabeth Cochran, whose asylum reports for the New York World prompted a grand jury investigation and a bigger budget for the city's institutions.

The word paparazzi comes from a news photographer character in which Federico Fellini film set in Rome?

La Dolce Vita features a pushy news photographer named Paparazzo, played by Walter Santesso, whose surname became the word for the whole trade in many languages.

Which newspaper format takes its name from a brand of compressed pills sold by a London drug company?

Tabloid was Burroughs Wellcome's trademark for compressed pills in the late 1880s. The word spread to anything condensed, including small-format papers that boiled the news down to short stories.

Which news-writing structure puts the most important facts first, so that editors can trim a report from the bottom?

The inverted pyramid lets an editor shorten an article by cutting from the bottom without losing the essentials. Many link its rise to the telegraph, which pushed reporters to condense.

Which deliberately misspelled word do American reporters use for a news article's first paragraph?

Lede probably began as an intentional misspelling of lead, so that instructions to printers would not be mistaken for text to be printed. Hed and dek arose the same way.

Which line on a newspaper article, usually printed between the headline and the text, credits the person who wrote it?

Byline credits were rare before the late 1800s. In 1863 Union General Joseph Hooker made battlefield reporters sign their articles so he would know whom to blame for errors.

Which shorthand name do reporters give the checklist of basic questions that every news report should answer?

The Five Ws are who, what, when, where and why. Reporters were being taught as far back as 1913 that the top of an article should answer every one of them.

Which word, also used for a police officer's regular patrol route, names a reporter's assigned area of coverage?

Beat reporters return to the same sources again and again, whether at city hall, the courts or a sports team, building the trust and background knowledge to spot what is new.

Which slang term names an exclusive that one news outlet manages to publish before any of its rivals?

Scoop rarely applies to events seen by crowds, such as a natural disaster or a press conference announcement, because no single outlet can claim to have had them first.

Which news value explains why a small-town paper covers a nearby house fire but ignores an identical blaze abroad?

Proximity is measured culturally and socially as well as geographically, so an audience can feel close to an event that happens a long way from home.

Which news value explains why yesterday's election result leads the front page while last month's result is ignored?

Timeliness favors events that have only just happened, are still unfolding or are about to happen, which is why editors chase fresh developments instead of repeating old facts.

Which phrase describes the top half of a broadsheet's front page, the part shoppers see on a newsstand?

Above the fold lives on in web design, where it means the part of a page a visitor sees without scrolling.

Which paragraph, usually placed just after a feature article's opening, tells readers why the piece matters?

Nut graf is short for nutshell paragraph. It supplies the context that a brief, attention-grabbing opening leaves out, and usually sits second or third in the article.

Which legal term covers a false, reputation-damaging statement published in writing, as opposed to spoken slander?

Libel traditionally covers defamation that is written, printed, posted online or published in mass media, so a false blog entry can bring a lawsuit just as a newspaper article can.

Which part of the US Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791, bars Congress from abridging the freedom of the press?

The First Amendment protects a cluster of freedoms in a single sentence: religion, speech, the press, peaceable assembly and the right to petition the government.

Under New York Times v. Sullivan, which standard must a public official prove to win a US defamation lawsuit?

Actual malice means the publisher knew a statement was false or recklessly ignored whether it was. The 1964 case grew out of a civil rights advertisement criticizing police in Montgomery, Alabama.

Which leaked secret history of the Vietnam War did the Supreme Court let US newspapers keep publishing in 1971?

The Pentagon Papers were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst who had worked on the study. The justices ruled 6–3 that the government had not justified an order halting publication.

Which Supreme Court ruling lets public high schools censor school-sponsored student newspapers for educational reasons?

Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier began when a Missouri principal pulled articles on divorce and teen pregnancy from a paper produced in a journalism class. The 1988 ruling went 5–3 against the students.

Which legal term names censorship that blocks a report before publication, as struck down in Near v. Minnesota?

Prior restraint lost its footing in 1931, when the Supreme Court threw out a Minnesota statute that let judges shut down a scandal sheet, The Saturday Press, as a public nuisance.

Which type of US state law protects reporters from being forced to reveal confidential sources in court?

Shield law protection matters because the Supreme Court ruled in Branzburg v. Hayes, in 1972, that the Constitution gives reporters no general right to refuse to testify before a grand jury.

Which phrase describes information a source gives a reporter on the understanding that it will not be published?

Off the record means the information cannot be published at all. That sets it apart from background material, which a reporter may use so long as the source is not named.

Which term names a source's condition that reporters hold back a news release until a set date and time?

Embargo breakers risk being cut off from future briefings by the source, which hands their more cooperative rivals a lasting advantage.

Which principle of the Society of Professional Journalists' code urges compassion for people affected by coverage?

Minimize Harm asks reporters to treat sources, subjects, colleagues and the public as human beings deserving of respect. The code's other three principles cover truth, independence and accountability.

Which New York printer's 1735 acquittal over attacks on the colonial governor became a symbol of press freedom?

John Peter Zenger spent more than eight months in prison before his lawyers, including Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia, argued successfully that publishing the truth was a defense.

Which US president popularized the label muckrakers for crusading investigative reporters in a 1906 speech?

Theodore Roosevelt borrowed the image from a character in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who rejected salvation to focus on filth, though he granted that such writers were often indispensable.

Which muckraker's exposé of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil ran in McClure's Magazine and fed the monopoly's breakup?

Ida Tarbell was born in Pennsylvania at the start of the oil boom. Her magazine series became a 1904 book that helped usher in a wave of antitrust laws, including the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.

Which Memphis newspaper co-owner, born into slavery, documented lynchings across the American South in the 1890s?

Ida B. Wells showed that lynching victims were not the criminals white Southerners claimed. A Pulitzer Prize special citation honored her courageous reporting in 2020, almost 90 years after her death.

Which novelist spent seven weeks undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants to research The Jungle?

Upton Sinclair wrote it for a socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, which ran the tale as a serial in 1905. The uproar helped pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Which press baron, the main inspiration for Citizen Kane, started out running The San Francisco Examiner for his father?

William Randolph Hearst took over the paper in 1887 and went on to assemble a chain of nearly 30 titles in major American cities, plus a stable of magazines.

Which CBS broadcaster, famed for wartime radio reports from London, challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy on See It Now?

Edward R. Murrow's television reports helped lead to the Senate's censure of McCarthy. He had stayed in London when war broke out in 1939 and broadcast live at the height of the Blitz.

Which CBS Evening News anchor from 1962 to 1981 was often called the most trusted man in America?

Walter Cronkite earned the title in an opinion poll. His coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969 drew the best ratings of any network.

Which broadcaster became the first woman to co-anchor a US network evening news program, joining ABC in 1976?

Barbara Walters was paired with Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News. Two years earlier she had become the first female co-host of an American news program, on NBC's Today.

Which writer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas pioneered gonzo reporting, in which the author joins the action?

Hunter S. Thompson first drew notice by living for a year among the Hells Angels motorcycle club. His Las Vegas saga was serialized in Rolling Stone before it became a book.

Which news agency, founded in 1846 and run as a cooperative of its member outlets, publishes a widely used stylebook?

The Associated Press sends its reports to member newspapers and broadcasters, and its election results and college sports polls are fixtures of American news.

Which news agency's founder began with a homing-pigeon service carrying messages between Aachen and Brussels in 1850?

Reuters was established in London in 1851 by Paul Reuter, a German-born entrepreneur who opened his news wire agency at the city's Royal Exchange.

Which New York university, left money by Joseph Pulitzer to open a journalism school, administers the Pulitzer Prizes?

Columbia received the bequest in the publisher's will, and its president sits on the board that chooses the winners.

Which newspaper's Spotlight team exposed the cover-up of abuse by Catholic priests, as told in an Oscar-winning film?

The Boston Globe won a Pulitzer Prize for the 2002 coverage. The 2015 drama named after its investigative unit went on to take the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Which nonprofit investigative newsroom became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 2010?

ProPublica won for a report on the life-and-death choices exhausted doctors made in a New Orleans hospital cut off by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

Which nickname for the press did Thomas Carlyle trace to an Edmund Burke remark about Parliament's reporters' gallery?

Fourth Estate adds the press to the three traditional estates of the realm: the clergy, the nobility and the commoners. Carlyle's 1840 account had Burke calling the reporters more important than all of them.

Which US law, signed by Lyndon Johnson on July 4, 1966, lets reporters request documents from federal agencies?

The Freedom of Information Act passed the House without a single vote against. It obliges agencies to hand documents promptly to any person who asks, not only to the press, unless an exemption applies.

Which New York paper, first issued by Benjamin Day in 1833, became America's first successful penny newspaper?

The Sun cost a single cent when rivals charged as much as six. In 1835 it ran the Great Moon Hoax, six articles claiming that life and civilization had been found on the lunar surface.

Which war did William Howard Russell cover for The Times for 22 months, earning fame as a pioneering war correspondent?

The Crimean War dispatches Russell sent home covered the Charge of the Light Brigade and the appalling conditions the troops endured, including an outbreak of cholera.

Which FCC policy, abolished in 1987, required broadcasters to air contrasting views on controversial public issues?

The fairness doctrine dated from 1949 and gave stations wide latitude in how they complied, whether through news segments, public affairs shows or commentary.