Media
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8correct to beat the crowd
This media quiz runs the whole history of mass communication in 109 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 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which German city did Gutenberg print his 42-line Bible in the 1450s?
Mainz
Gutenberg printed the 42-line Bible at Mainz, his home city on the Rhine; about 180 copies were finished around 1455 using his oil-based ink and hand-cast metal type.
Q 02The Relation, recognised as the world's first newspaper, began printing in 1605 in which city?
Strasbourg
Johann Carolus, a Strasbourg bookbinder turned printer, gathered news from postmen and traders for the Relation; some historians call its book-like format 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
A penny paper, the Sun cost one cent, a sixth of its six-cent rivals; newsboys hawked it on the street and advertising, not subscriptions, paid its way.
Q 04The term 'yellow journalism' grew out of an 1890s circulation war between which two New York publishers?
Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst
Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst fought over the Yellow Kid, a comic strip Hearst lured away from Pulitzer's World in 1896; historians now doubt their papers actually caused the Spanish-American War.
Q 05Which university administers the Pulitzer Prizes, established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer?
Columbia
Columbia University in New York administers the prizes, which Pulitzer's will endowed along with the university's journalism school; the Pulitzer board announces winners each spring.
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
The Yomiuri Shimbun, founded in Tokyo in 1874, was certified by Guinness in 2002 with a combined morning-and-evening circulation above 14 million; it also owns the Yomiuri Giants baseball team.
Q 08What did Paul Julius Reuter use in 1850 to carry stock prices between Aachen and Brussels?
Homing pigeons
Homing pigeons bridged the gap in the telegraph line between Aachen and Brussels, beating the train by hours; Reuter moved to London in 1851, and the Morning Advertiser became his 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
News of The Mexican-American War arrived by pony express and boat, so five New York dailies pooled the cost in 1846 to form the Associated Press, a cooperative that publishes the AP Stylebook.
Q 10Which single Morse letter did Marconi receive as the first transatlantic radio signal in December 1901?
S
The letter S, three dots in Morse, was sent from Poldhu in Cornwall to Signal Hill, Newfoundland, about 2,200 miles away; Marconi 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
Presidential election returns were read out as they came in: listeners heard Harding beat Cox before the newspapers could print it. Westinghouse owned the station, which grew out of an engineer's amateur transmitter.
Q 12How is the BBC principally funded?
A licence fee on households
A licence fee on households with a television, set by the government, pays for most BBC services; the corporation carries no advertising on its UK channels.
Q 13Franklin D. Roosevelt's radio addresses to the nation between 1933 and 1944 are known by what name?
Q 21Which CBS broadcaster took on Senator McCarthy on See It Now in 1954, signing off 'Good night, and good luck'?
Edward R. Murrow
Edward R. Murrow had made his name with wartime radio reports from the Blitz that opened 'This is London'; after the 9 March 1954 broadcast, viewer letters ran about 15 to 1 in his favour.
Q 22Which Ted Turner network, launched 1 June 1980, was the first 24-hour news channel?
CNN
CNN went on air from Atlanta on 1 June 1980 with anchors David Walker and Lois Hart; its round-the-clock coverage of the 1991 Gulf War from Baghdad 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
Fireside chats
Fireside chats was the name CBS executive Harry Butcher gave the talks; the first, eight days into the presidency on 12 March 1933, explained the banking crisis to some 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
Grover's Mill, New Jersey, a hamlet near Princeton, was the landing site; the legend of nationwide panic was largely manufactured by newspapers eager to discredit radio, and a ratings survey found only about 2 percent listening.
Q 15Which Scottish inventor first publicly demonstrated a working television in London in 1926?
John Logie Baird
John Logie Baird used a mechanical system with a spinning Nipkow disc; he went on to manage the first transatlantic television transmission and the first colour pictures in 1928, and sold thermal undersocks on the side.
Q 16What was the first image Philo Farnsworth transmitted on his electronic television in 1927?
A straight line
A straight line, scratched on a glass slide, was the first picture sent on 7 September 1927 in his San Francisco lab; Farnsworth had sketched the idea at 14 while ploughing an Idaho field in parallel rows.
Q 17The first TV commercial, aired in New York on 1 July 1941, was for which product?
Bulova watches
Bulova watches paid about nine dollars for a spot showing a clock over a map of the United States on WNBT before a Brooklyn Dodgers game; the station had received its commercial licence that day.
Q 18Which 1953 event, watched by 27 million in Britain, was the first of its kind televised in full?
The coronation of Elizabeth II
The coronation of Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953 was the first shown live in full; Churchill's cabinet wanted the cameras kept out of Westminster Abbey and the young Queen overruled them.
Q 19Which candidate did TV viewers think won the first televised US presidential debate in 1960?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy looked tanned and rested beside Nixon, who had refused make-up, sweated under the lights and wore a grey suit that blended into the set; about 70 million watched on 26 September 1960.
Q 20Which CBS anchor, "the most trusted man in America", signed off with "And that's the way it is"?
Walter Cronkite
Walter Cronkite anchored the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981, broke the news of Kennedy's death on air, and his 1968 verdict that Vietnam was a stalemate shook the White House.
Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles opened MTV, a pointed choice for a music-video channel; the song reached only number 40 in the US despite topping charts in 16 countries.
Q 24In the Nielsen television ratings, one rating point represents what?
One percent of TV households
One percent of TV households in the measured market equals one rating point, so a 10 rating means a tenth of homes with sets were tuned in; Nielsen measures hardest in the February, May, July and November sweeps.
Q 25Time magazine's first 'Man of the Year', in 1927, was which aviator?
Charles Lindbergh
Charles Lindbergh was chosen after his solo Atlantic flight, partly because editors regretted not putting him on the cover after it; the title became Person of the Year in 1999.
Q 26Which magazine, first published in 1888, is recognisable by the yellow border on its cover?
National Geographic
National Geographic first printed photographs in 1905, with a spread of Lhasa, and ran early colour Autochromes in the 1910s; the yellow border has framed its cover since 1910.
Q 27What was unusual about the physical format of Reader's Digest?
Its pages were half the normal size
Its pages were half the normal size of a magazine, a pocket 'digest' format for condensed articles from other titles; it lost the US circulation crown to Better Homes and Gardens in 2009.
Q 28Which Canadian thinker coined the phrases 'the medium is the message' and 'global village'?
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan argued in Understanding Media (1964) that a medium reshapes society regardless of its content, using the electric light bulb, which carries no content at all, as his example.
Q 29In which year was the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, in force since 1949, scrapped?
1987
The FCC voted to abolish the doctrine in August 1987 after Ronald Reagan vetoed a bill from Congress writing it into law; its disappearance is often blamed for the rise of one-sided talk radio.
Q 30Which two Washington Post reporters broke the Watergate scandal, aided by 'Deep Throat'?
Woodward and Bernstein
Woodward and Bernstein, then junior Post reporters, followed the June 1972 break-in to the White House; Deep Throat kept his secret for 33 years before revealing himself in 2005 as Mark Felt, the FBI's associate director.