This media quiz runs the whole history of mass communication in 60 free questions with answers. It starts with print: Gutenberg's press, the first newspaper, the penny press, the Hearst-Pulitzer circulation war that gave us 'yellow journalism', the Pulitzer Prizes, the Gray Lady and the world's biggest-selling daily. Then it moves through the wire agencies and their carrier pigeons, the birth of radio (Marconi, KDKA, the fireside chats, the War of the Worlds), the arrival of television (Baird and Farnsworth, the first TV commercial, the 1953 coronation, the Kennedy-Nixon debate, Cronkite and Murrow, CNN and MTV), the great journalism stories (the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, WikiLeaks) and the ideas people use to talk about media, from the fourth estate to 'the medium is the message'. The last stretch is the internet age: the first website, the first banner ad, Wikipedia, the word 'podcast', Netflix's switch to streaming and the day Google bought YouTube. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who reads the news; the rest suit journalism students, media-studies classes and pub-quiz teams with a communications nerd on board. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and other reference sources, and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Around 1440, in which German city did Johannes Gutenberg develop the movable-type printing press?
Mainz
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.
Q 02The Relation, recognised as the world's first newspaper, began printing in 1605 in which city?
Strasbourg
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.
Q 03Benjamin Day's New York Sun, launched in 1833, was the first successful newspaper of what kind?
A penny paper
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.
Q 04The term 'yellow journalism' grew out of an 1890s circulation war between which two New York publishers?
Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst
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.
Q 05Which university administers the Pulitzer Prizes, established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer?
Columbia
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.
Q 06Which newspaper carries the motto 'All the News That's Fit to Print' and is nicknamed 'the Gray Lady'?
The New York Times
Founded in 1851, it has won more Pulitzers than any other publication and was the paper that first printed the Pentagon Papers.
Q 07Which Japanese daily held the Guinness record for the world's largest circulation, over 10 million copies?
Yomiuri Shimbun
It also founded Japan's first professional baseball team, the Yomiuri Giants; the morning edition still sells close to six million.
Q 08What did Paul Julius Reuter famously use in 1851 to carry stock prices between Aachen and Brussels?
Homing pigeons
The birds bridged a gap in the telegraph line; the Morning Advertiser became the agency's first newspaper subscriber in 1858.
Q 09Five New York papers founded the Associated Press in 1846 to share the cost of covering which war?
The Mexican-American 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.
Q 10Which single Morse letter did Marconi receive as the first transatlantic radio signal in December 1901?
S
Three dots, sent from Poldhu in Cornwall about 2,200 miles away; he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for wireless telegraphy.
Q 11What did Pittsburgh's KDKA report in its famous first broadcast on 2 November 1920?
Presidential election returns
Listeners heard Harding beat Cox before the newspapers could print it; the station was owned by Westinghouse and originally meant for company communications.
Q 12How is the BBC principally funded?
A licence fee on households
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.
Q 13Franklin D. Roosevelt's radio addresses to the nation between 1933 and 1944 are known by what name?
Fireside chats
Q 21Which CBS broadcaster took on Senator McCarthy on See It Now in 1954, signing off 'Good night, and good luck'?
Edward R. Murrow
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.
Q 22Which Ted Turner network, launched 1 June 1980, was the first 24-hour news channel?
CNN
It broadcast from Atlanta, and its round-the-clock coverage of the 1991 Gulf War made it a global brand.
Q 23What was the first clip played on MTV when it launched at 12:01 a.m. on 1 August 1981?
Video Killed the Radio Star
A CBS executive coined the phrase; the first, eight days into his presidency, explained the banking crisis to more than 60 million listeners.
Q 14Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast landed its Martians in Grover's Mill, in which US state?
New Jersey
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.
Q 15Which Scottish inventor first publicly demonstrated a working television in London in 1926?
John Logie Baird
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.
Q 16What was the first image Philo Farnsworth transmitted on his electronic television in 1927?
A straight line
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.
Q 17The first TV commercial, aired in New York on 1 July 1941, was for which product?
Bulova watches
It was just a clock face on the test card ticking for a minute, and it cost somewhere between four and nine dollars.
Q 18Which 1953 event, watched by 27 million in Britain, was the first of its kind televised in full?
The coronation of Elizabeth II
Churchill wanted the cameras kept out of Westminster Abbey; the young Queen overruled him.
Q 19Which candidate did TV viewers think won the first televised US presidential debate in 1960?
John F. Kennedy
Nixon had refused make-up, sweated under the lights and wore a grey suit that vanished into the set; about 70 million people watched.
Q 20Which CBS anchor, "the most trusted man in America", signed off with "And that's the way it is"?
Walter Cronkite
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.
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.
Q 24In the Nielsen television ratings, one rating point represents what?
One percent of TV households
The company measures hardest during the four 'sweeps' months of February, May, July and November, when local advertising rates are set.
Q 25Time magazine's first 'Man of the Year', in 1927, was which aviator?
Charles Lindbergh
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'.
Q 26Which magazine, first published in 1888, is recognisable by the yellow border on its cover?
National Geographic
It began printing photographs in 1905 and pioneered colour photography in the 1910s; Disney has owned a controlling stake since 2019.
Q 27What was unusual about the physical format of Reader's Digest?
Its pages were half the normal size
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.
Q 28Which Canadian thinker coined the phrases 'the medium is the message' and 'global village'?
Marshall McLuhan
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.
Q 29The press is often called the 'fourth estate'. What were the original three?
Clergy, nobility and commoners
Thomas Carlyle credited Edmund Burke with pointing at the reporters' gallery in Parliament and calling it 'a Fourth Estate more important far'.
Q 30In which year was the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, in force since 1949, scrapped?
1987
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.