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
Mainz was Gutenberg's home city, and a court there gave his financier Johann Fust control of the Bible workshop in 1455, around the time the 42-line Bible was finished.
Q 02The German-language Relation, recognised as the world's first newspaper, began printing in 1605 in which city?
Strasbourg
Strasbourg printer Johann Carolus had been copying a weekly newsletter out by hand; he bought a printing workshop to save time, and the Relation was the result.
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 when rivals charged five or six; newsboys hawked it in the street, and advertising rather than subscriptions paid its way.
Q 04Which two New York publishers' 1890s circulation war inspired the term 'yellow journalism'?
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
The New York Times adopted the motto under a new owner in 1896; in 1971 it published the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War, despite pressure from the Nixon administration.
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 listed by Guinness with morning and evening editions that together passed 13 million copies; its owner also founded the baseball team now called the Yomiuri Giants.
Q 08What did Paul Julius Reuter use to carry stock prices across a telegraph gap between Aachen and Brussels?
Homing pigeons
Homing pigeons joined the ends of the German and French-Belgian telegraph lines; in 1851 Reuter moved to London and opened an office near the Stock Exchange, and in 1858 the Morning Advertiser became his first newspaper subscriber.
Q 09Five New York papers founded the Associated Press in 1846 to share the cost of covering which war?
The Mexican-American War
The Mexican-American War was far from New York, so in 1846 five of the city's dailies agreed to share a pony express route through Alabama that beat the Post Office north; the Associated Press grew from that deal.
Q 10Which single Morse letter did Marconi report hearing as the first transatlantic radio signal in December 1901?
S
The letter S, three dots in Morse, was the test signal sent from Poldhu in Cornwall; Marconi reported hearing it in Newfoundland through an aerial lifted by a kite.
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 that watch live television pays for most BBC services; it began in the 1920s as a licence for radio sets, long before television arrived.
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'; his 1954 programme used McCarthy's own words and film against the senator.
Q 22Which Ted Turner network, launched 1 June 1980, was the first 24-hour news channel?
CNN
CNN's first newscast was anchored by a husband-and-wife team, David Walker and Lois Hart; in 1991 its live reports from inside Iraq during the Gulf War beat the established networks.
Q 23What was the first clip played on MTV when it launched on 1 August 1981?
Video Killed the Radio Star
Fireside chats
Fireside chats got their name from Harry Butcher, a CBS executive in Washington; in the first, eight days into his presidency, Roosevelt explained the banking crisis in plain language.
Q 14Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast landed its Martians in Grover's Mill, in which US state?
New Jersey
New Jersey's Grover's Mill, a village in West Windsor, was the landing site; newspapers played up the panic, and a ratings survey that night found only about 2 percent of homes tuned to the play.
Q 15Which Scottish inventor first publicly demonstrated a working television in London in 1926?
John Logie Baird
John Logie Baird built his first set from odds and ends, including an old hatbox, a tea chest and darning needles; in 1928 his firm sent the first television pictures across the Atlantic.
Q 16What was the first image Philo Farnsworth transmitted on his electronic television in 1927?
A straight line
A straight line painted on a glass slide was the first picture sent between rooms of his San Francisco lab; the better-known dollar sign came later, in a demonstration for his impatient backers.
Q 17The first TV commercial, aired in New York on 1 July 1941, was for which product?
Bulova watches
Bulova watches paid less than ten dollars for the spot, a clock face shown on New York's WNBT before a Brooklyn Dodgers game, on the first day commercial television was allowed.
Q 18Which 1953 event, seen by over 20 million Britons, was the first of its kind televised in full?
The coronation of Elizabeth II
The coronation of Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953 drew a television audience that outnumbered radio's for the first time; for her parents' coronation in 1937 the cameras had been kept outside Westminster Abbey.
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; after a reporting trip to Vietnam in 1968 he told viewers the war was mired in stalemate.
Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles opened MTV, a pointed choice for a music-video channel; the 1979 single had topped the British chart but only reached number 40 in the US.
Q 24In the Nielsen television ratings, one rating point represents what?
One percent of TV households
One percent of TV households in the measured area equals one rating point, so a 10 rating means a tenth of homes with sets were tuned in; Nielsen long relied on paper diaries that viewers filled in during quarterly sweeps.
Q 25Who was Time magazine's first 'Man of the Year', honoured for 1927?
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 began as a scholarly journal and remade itself as a picture magazine in the 1900s; it became one of the first magazines to print colour photographs.
Q 27Which pocket-size magazine did DeWitt and Lila Wallace launch in 1922?
Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest was turned down by numerous publishers, so the Wallaces brought it out themselves on a small budget, filling it with condensed articles from other magazines.
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 29Which president vetoed a bill to write the FCC's Fairness Doctrine into law?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill in June 1987, and that August the FCC voted 4-0 to drop the 1949 rule, which had required broadcasters to air contrasting views on controversial public issues.
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.