60 Fun Facts About Media

Around 1440, in which German city did Johannes Gutenberg develop the movable-type printing press?

Movable type already existed in East Asia; Gutenberg's press, oil-based ink and casting moulds are what made printing fast. About 180 copies of his 42-line Bible were finished in 1455.

The Relation, recognised as the world's first newspaper, began printing in 1605 in which city?

Johann Carolus, a bookbinder turned printer, got his news from postmen and traders; some historians grumble that its book-like format makes it a 'newsbook' rather than a newspaper.

Benjamin Day's New York Sun, launched in 1833, was the first successful newspaper of what kind?

At one cent it cost a sixth of its rivals, was sold on the street by newsboys and paid its way with advertising rather than subscriptions, a model newspapers kept for 180 years.

The term 'yellow journalism' grew out of an 1890s circulation war between which two New York publishers?

The name comes from the Yellow Kid, a comic-strip character who appeared first in one paper and then the other; historians now doubt the papers actually caused the Spanish-American War.

Which university administers the Pulitzer Prizes, established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer?

There are 23 prizes; each carries 15,000 dollars except one, which is the only one given to a news organisation and comes with a gold medal.

Which newspaper carries the motto 'All the News That's Fit to Print' and is nicknamed 'the Gray Lady'?

Founded in 1851, it has won more Pulitzers than any other publication and was the paper that first printed the Pentagon Papers.

Which Japanese daily held the Guinness record for the world's largest circulation, over 10 million copies?

It also founded Japan's first professional baseball team, the Yomiuri Giants; the morning edition still sells close to six million.

What did Paul Julius Reuter famously use in 1851 to carry stock prices between Aachen and Brussels?

The birds bridged a gap in the telegraph line; the Morning Advertiser became the agency's first newspaper subscriber in 1858.

Five New York papers founded the Associated Press in 1846 to share the cost of covering which war?

It is still a nonprofit cooperative, publishes the AP Stylebook that most American newsrooms follow, and its election calls are what the networks wait for.

Which single Morse letter did Marconi receive as the first transatlantic radio signal in December 1901?

Three dots, sent from Poldhu in Cornwall about 2,200 miles away; he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for wireless telegraphy.

What did Pittsburgh's KDKA report in its famous first broadcast on 2 November 1920?

Listeners heard Harding beat Cox before the newspapers could print it; the station was owned by Westinghouse and originally meant for company communications.

How is the BBC principally funded?

Its Reithian mission is to inform, educate and entertain, and its motto is 'Nation shall speak peace unto Nation'; the World Service broadcasts in 43 languages.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's radio addresses to the nation between 1933 and 1944 are known by what name?

A CBS executive coined the phrase; the first, eight days into his presidency, explained the banking crisis to more than 60 million listeners.

Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast landed its Martians in Grover's Mill, in which US state?

The legend of nationwide panic was largely manufactured by newspapers eager to discredit radio as an advertising rival; only about 2 percent of households were even listening.

Which Scottish inventor first publicly demonstrated a working television in London in 1926?

His system was mechanical, using a spinning disc; he also managed the first transatlantic television transmission and the first colour pictures in 1928, and invented thermal socks on the side.

What was the first image Philo Farnsworth transmitted on his electronic television in 1927?

He was 21, working in a San Francisco lab, and had sketched the idea as a 14-year-old ploughing an Idaho potato field in parallel rows.

The first TV commercial, aired in New York on 1 July 1941, was for which product?

It was just a clock face on the test card ticking for a minute, and it cost somewhere between four and nine dollars.

Which 1953 event, watched by 27 million in Britain, was the first of its kind televised in full?

Churchill wanted the cameras kept out of Westminster Abbey; the young Queen overruled him.

Which candidate did TV viewers think won the first televised US presidential debate in 1960?

Nixon had refused make-up, sweated under the lights and wore a grey suit that vanished into the set; about 70 million people watched.

Which CBS anchor, "the most trusted man in America", signed off with "And that's the way it is"?

He anchored the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981 and broke the news of Kennedy's death; his 1968 verdict that Vietnam was a stalemate shook the White House.

Which CBS broadcaster took on Senator McCarthy on See It Now in 1954, signing off 'Good night, and good luck'?

He had made his name with wartime radio reports from the Blitz that opened 'This is London'; letters after the McCarthy broadcast ran 15 to 1 in his favour.

Which Ted Turner network, launched 1 June 1980, was the first 24-hour news channel?

It broadcast from Atlanta, and its round-the-clock coverage of the 1991 Gulf War made it a global brand.

What was the first clip played on MTV when it launched at 12:01 a.m. on 1 August 1981?

The song only reached number 40 in the US despite topping 16 charts elsewhere; the same clip was the last thing shown when MTV Music closed in the UK in December 2025.

In the Nielsen television ratings, one rating point represents what?

The company measures hardest during the four 'sweeps' months of February, May, July and November, when local advertising rates are set.

Time magazine's first 'Man of the Year', in 1927, was which aviator?

The title became Person of the Year in 1999; the 1982 pick was the computer, as Machine of the Year, and the 2006 pick was 'You'.

Which magazine, first published in 1888, is recognisable by the yellow border on its cover?

It began printing photographs in 1905 and pioneered colour photography in the 1910s; Disney has owned a controlling stake since 2019.

What was unusual about the physical format of Reader's Digest?

The idea was to condense articles from other magazines into pocket size; it lost the top-seller title to Better Homes and Gardens in 2009.

Which Canadian thinker coined the phrases 'the medium is the message' and 'global village'?

His 1964 book Understanding Media argued that a medium reshapes society regardless of its content, using the light bulb, which has no content at all, as his example.

The press is often called the 'fourth estate'. What were the original three?

Thomas Carlyle credited Edmund Burke with pointing at the reporters' gallery in Parliament and calling it 'a Fourth Estate more important far'.

In which year was the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, in force since 1949, scrapped?

Congress tried to write it into law and Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill; its disappearance is often blamed for the rise of one-sided talk radio.

Which two Washington Post reporters broke the Watergate scandal, aided by 'Deep Throat'?

Deep Throat kept his secret for 33 years before revealing himself in 2005 as Mark Felt, the FBI's associate director; Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974.

To which newspaper did Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon Papers in 1971?

The Nixon administration got an injunction; the Supreme Court threw it out 6-3 within a fortnight, with Justice Black writing that only a free press can expose deception in government.

Which website founded by Julian Assange released the 'Collateral Murder' video and US diplomatic cables in 2010?

PayPal, Visa and Mastercard blocked donations afterwards, cutting its income by about 95 percent.

World Press Freedom Day, marking the 1991 Windhoek Declaration, falls on which date?

The UN General Assembly proclaimed it in 1993; UNESCO marks the day with the Guillermo Cano prize, named after a Colombian editor murdered by drug traffickers.

Reporters Without Borders, publisher of the World Press Freedom Index, was founded in 1985 in which country?

It began in Montpellier and is now based in Paris; the index ranks 180 countries from 'good' to 'very serious'.

Tim Berners-Lee published the first website in 1990 while working at which European lab?

He wrote HTTP, HTML, the first server and a browser he called WorldWideWeb; the Mosaic browser's inline images in 1993 are what turned it into a mass medium.

The first web banner ad, put online by HotWired on 27 October 1994, was paid for by which company?

An astonishing 44 percent of people who saw it clicked on it; today a banner is doing well at half a percent.

Wikipedia launched on 15 January 2001. Its name is a blend of 'encyclopedia' and what?

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger started it as a feeder for a more formal project called Nupedia, which died; the offshoot now runs in more than 300 languages.

'Podcast', coined by Ben Hammersley in a 2004 Guardian article, blends 'broadcast' and what?

Apple did not add podcast support to iTunes until June 2005, more than a year after the word existed.

Netflix, founded in 1997 as a DVD-by-mail business, launched its streaming service in which year?

It started with about 1,000 films against 70,000 on disc; House of Cards in 2013 was the first series commissioned specifically for the service.

Google bought YouTube in November 2006 for roughly how much?

The site was 21 months old and had been founded by three former PayPal employees; by 2024 viewers were watching more than a billion hours of it a day.

Which newspaper's rivalry with Pulitzer's World gave the world the Yellow Kid and 'yellow journalism'?

Historian Frank Luther Mott's checklist of the genre included screaming headlines, faked interviews and lavish colour supplements; the Journal was Hearst's flagship.

Which is the only Pulitzer Prize awarded to a news organisation and the only one with a gold medal?

Juries put up three finalists in each of the 23 categories and the Pulitzer board, made up of editors and academics, picks the winners.

Which magazine chose 'You' as its 2006 Person of the Year, recognising user-generated content on the web?

The cover was a reflective panel so readers saw themselves; the criterion, for better or worse, is who has done the most to influence the year's events, which is how Hitler made the list in 1938.

Which broadcaster's purpose is summarised, in words attributed to its founding chief, as 'inform, educate, entertain'?

The three-word summary is attributed to John Reith and has since been borrowed by public broadcasters around the world, including PBS.

Which 1969 Supreme Court case unanimously upheld the Fairness Doctrine on grounds of spectrum scarcity?

The scarcity argument is why broadcast TV can be regulated in ways newspapers and websites cannot.

Al Jazeera Arabic was launched on 1 November 1996 by the government of which country?

Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani had floated the idea in 1994 and the network started with about $137 million in state funding.

The Financial Times is famously printed on newsprint of which distinctive colour?

Sheffield's weekly sports paper, the Green 'Un, likewise takes its name from the colour of its paper.

When it was established in 1922, the BBC's initials stood for the British Broadcasting what?

It became a Crown-chartered Corporation on 1 January 1927 on the recommendation of the Crawford Committee.

Under what title was The Times of London first published on 1 January 1785?

Founder John Walter had lost his insurance job after a Jamaican hurricane bankrupted his employer; the modern name arrived in 1788.

What was the Radio Times, launched by the BBC in 1923, the first example of?

Its 1988 Christmas issue sold over 11 million copies, one of the biggest sales for any British magazine.

In which year did the commercial ITV network first give the BBC competition in television?

The BBC's radio monopoly lasted much longer, until independent local radio arrived in October 1973.

In which year did Al Jazeera English launch as the network's English-language channel?

Demand for an English service surged after 2001, when Al Jazeera was the only international network broadcasting from Kabul.

What motto did the BBC adopt on its coat of arms when it became a corporation in 1927?

Reith's stated aim was to broadcast all that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement.

Which Paris agency, founded in 1835 and the world's oldest news service, was the forerunner of AFP?

Occupying Germans renamed it the Office français d'information in 1940; it re-emerged as Agence France-Presse after the Liberation.

The block-printed Kaiyuan Za Bao, among the earliest newspapers, dates from which Chinese dynasty?

It published government news; in the West, the first folio-sized paper was the Dutch Courante of 1618.

In which city did 23-year-old student Paul Nipkow patent his image-scanning spinning disk in 1884?

He never built a working model, but John Logie Baird revived the forgotten patent for his mechanical television in 1923.

WRGB, the world's first television station in 1928, broadcast from a GE plant in which city?

Known popularly as WGY Television, it began under the call sign W2XCW.

Where did Philo Farnsworth give the first public demonstration of all-electronic television in 1934?

The Philadelphia demonstration ran for ten days; a year earlier RCA had introduced Zworykin's Iconoscope camera tube.

Which title became the first daily Internet newspaper with its own paid reporters, in 1995?

Since then the industry has faced soaring newsprint prices and slumping ad revenue as readers moved online.