Newspapers Trivia
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90 free Newspapers trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Newspapers have been coining words, naming toys and toppling presidents for four centuries, and the best stories about them rarely make it into the paper itself: the hoax that sold out a penny sheet, the forged diaries a serious title paid a fortune for, the headline a president waved at photographers, and the crossword that quietly recruited codebreakers. These 90 questions cover the first printed papers and the oldest still running, the barons who built empires and the baron who tried to bury a film, the tabloid headlines everyone quotes, the hoaxes and fabrications that cost prizes, newsroom slang from the copy desk, the cartoonists whose drawings changed politics and the comics pages, puzzles and advice columns that readers actually open the paper for. It suits a pub quiz round, a journalism class or anyone who still reads the paper with breakfast. Play on your phone with instant answers and a short explanation for each, or print it for the table.
30 of 90 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Until 1966, what filled the front page of The Times of London instead of news?
Classified advertisements
Classified advertisements had the front page to themselves until 1966, when news finally took over. Later that same year the Astor family agreed to sell the paper to the press baron Roy Thomson.
Q 02Which paper's 1948 headline 'Dewey Defeats Truman' was gleefully held aloft by the re-elected president?
Chicago Daily Tribune
The Chicago Daily Tribune, which had called Truman a 'nincompoop', had to go to press hours early because of a printers' strike, and it trusted the polls. Two days later he was handed a copy on his train in St. Louis.
Q 03Clifford Berryman's 1902 Washington Post cartoon, which inspired the teddy bear, showed Theodore Roosevelt refusing to do what?
Shoot a tethered bear
Shoot a tethered bear: his guides had tied one to a tree on a Mississippi hunt, and he called the idea unsporting. Brooklyn shopkeeper Morris Michtom saw the cartoon and put a stuffed 'Teddy's bear' in his window.
Q 04Charles Schulz died at what point before his final original Peanuts strip appeared in newspapers in February 2000?
One day earlier
One day earlier: Schulz, who had announced his retirement shortly before because of colon cancer, died in his sleep the night before the farewell strip ran. He had drawn Peanuts since 1950.
Q 05Rival advice columnists 'Dear Abby' (Pauline Phillips) and Ann Landers (Esther Lederer) were what to each other?
Twin sisters
Twin sisters, born Esther Pauline and Pauline Esther Friedman, who even married on the same day in a joint ceremony. When 'Dear Abby' followed Ann Landers into print, the rivalry soured into a feud that took years to patch up.
Q 06In Superman's 1938 debut, Clark Kent worked for which paper, named after a Toronto daily its artist once sold as a newsboy?
The Star
The Star, in full the Daily Star, only became the Daily Planet in 1940. Joe Shuster said he also modelled Superman's city, Metropolis, on the Toronto of his boyhood.
Q 07Before it described newspapers, 'Tabloid' was the London firm Burroughs Wellcome's trademark for what kind of product?
Compressed pills
Compressed pills: the drug firm built 'Tabloid' from 'tablet' in the 1880s. Within two decades the word meant anything boiled down, and newspapers that served the news in short, condensed form took the name.
Q 08Which press baron, enraged by Citizen Kane's unflattering portrait of him, pressured cinemas to limit its showings?
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst is said to have barred any mention of the film in his papers, while Hollywood allies led by Louis B. Mayer offered to buy the negative so that it could be burned. The studio released it anyway.
Q 09In Citizen Kane, which little newspaper does the young Kane take over, thinking it would be fun to run?
The New York Inquirer
The New York Inquirer had come to Kane's estate through a foreclosure. Uninterested in his gold mines and oil wells, he told the banker Thatcher not to sell it, then used it to attack Thatcher's fellow tycoons.
Q 10Which paper did Alfred Harmsworth launch in 1896 with the slogan 'a penny newspaper for one halfpenny'?
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail kept every story short for the busy reader and was an instant hit. Its first issue ran to 397,215 copies, and within three years it was selling half a million a day.
Q 11Which paper did Alfred Harmsworth launch in 1903 as a newspaper for women, run by women, then relaunch with pictures?
Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror flopped as a women's paper within months, so Harmsworth sacked its women journalists, cut the price to a halfpenny and filled the pages with pictures. Sales took off.
Q 12Which Sunday tabloid printed its final edition, headlined 'Thank You & Goodbye', on 10 July 2011 after 168 years?
News of the World
News of the World was shut by News International within days of the revelation that a private investigator it hired had hacked the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Q 13'Gotcha', a notorious tabloid front page of May 1982, celebrated the torpedoing of which Argentine ship?
Q 21Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace debuted in March 1951 on the very day an unrelated British Dennis first appeared in which comic?
The Beano
The Beano's Dennis and the American one are a pure coincidence: neither creator could have known what the other was planning. Hank Ketcham simply based his on his own four-year-old son, who was called Dennis.
Q 22Which publisher bought the loss-making New York Times in 1896 and gave it the motto 'All the News That's Fit to Print'?
Adolph Ochs
Adolph Ochs bought control with $75,000 of borrowed money, then in 1898 cut the price from three cents to one. The gamble drew readers away from the sensational penny papers and probably saved the paper.
Q 23Which slogan did The Washington Post unveil in February 2017, first on Snapchat and then on its website?
General Belgrano
The General Belgrano was at first reported as only damaged. As the likely death toll sank in, The Sun's editor pulled 'Gotcha' from later editions and ran 'Did 1,200 Argies drown?', though Rupert Murdoch saw no need.
Q 14'It's The Sun Wot Won It' claimed credit in April 1992 for which party's general election victory?
The Conservatives
The Conservatives under John Major kept power, and the paper claimed the credit. Twenty years later Rupert Murdoch told the Leveson inquiry the boast was 'tasteless and wrong' and had earned its editor a dressing-down.
Q 15'The Truth', a 1989 front page falsely blaming Hillsborough victims, sparked a decades-long boycott of The Sun in which area?
Merseyside
Merseyside turned its back on the paper after it smeared Liverpool fans. When the editor asked Liverpool's manager Kenny Dalglish how to mend things, Dalglish suggested a headline of the same size reading 'We lied'.
Q 16'Headless Body in Topless Bar', Vincent Musetto's 1983 headline, ran in which tabloid founded by Alexander Hamilton?
New York Post
The New York Post began in 1801 as a Federalist broadsheet and turned tabloid only in 1942. Musetto's headline went on to become the title of a 1995 film, and he ended his career as the paper's film critic.
Q 17'Ford to City: Drop Dead', words the president never said, was a 1975 headline in which paper, America's first successful tabloid?
New York Daily News
The New York Daily News boiled Gerald Ford's refusal of a bailout down to two words he never used. Two months later he signed federal loans for the city, and he later said the headline cost him the 1976 election.
Q 18The Great Moon Hoax of 1835, a penny paper's tale of bat-winged lunar people, credited which astronomer with the find?
John Herschel
John Herschel, then observing at the Cape of Good Hope, was amused when the story reached him. Within two years he was complaining of being pestered from every side by people who believed it.
Q 19Which British paper bought the rights to the forged 'Hitler Diaries' in 1983 after historian Hugh Trevor-Roper vouched for them?
The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times rushed the diaries into print just as Trevor-Roper was changing his mind, which he admitted at the launch press conference. Tests soon showed the sixty volumes were the work of the forger Konrad Kujau.
Q 20Which British paper dreamed up San Serriffe, an island nation whose place names were printing terms, as a 1977 April Fool?
The Guardian
The Guardian gave the hoax a seven-page supplement, and real advertisers played along: Kodak asked readers to send in their photographs of the islands. Plenty of readers were taken in and wanted to know more.
Democracy Dies in Darkness
'Democracy Dies in Darkness' was the paper's first official slogan in 140 years. It was a favourite line of Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, who said he had not coined it but picked it up from a judge.
Q 24Rupert Murdoch moved his London papers in January 1986 to a new plant in which district, sacking the printers who struck?
Wapping
Wapping's new plant ran on computer typesetting that needed far fewer printers. The strike collapsed after a year, and within a few years the other national papers had followed Murdoch out of Fleet Street.
Q 25Which British daily, launched in October 1986, printed its final paper edition in March 2016 and became online-only?
The Independent
The Independent was started by three journalists who had left The Daily Telegraph, and within a few years it was selling more than 400,000 copies a day. Then came a long slide that ended with print being abandoned.
Q 26Often taken to mean 'opinion', the 'op' in a newspaper's op-ed page is actually short for what?
Opposite
Opposite: the page sits facing the paper's own editorials. Editor Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World gave that page over to opinion columns in 1921.
Q 27Which grim term do newsrooms use for a newspaper's archive of old clippings and photographs?
The morgue
The morgue is said to have started as slang for obituaries written while their subjects were still alive, and later came to mean the whole library of clippings and photos.
Q 28North American reporters traditionally typed '-30-' on their copy to tell editors what?
The end
The end: '-30-' marked the close of a reporter's copy. Nobody is sure why; a popular theory credits telegraphers, whose code is said to have used 30 to sign off a message.
Q 29Which typeface, developed under Stanley Morison's direction, was first seen by the public on 3 October 1932?
Times New Roman
Times New Roman was made for The Times of London, which unveiled it that day. Its letters were drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the paper's advertising department.
Q 30The spire of St Bride's, the journalists' church on Fleet Street, is said to have inspired what?
The wedding cake
The wedding cake took its tiers from the steeple, the story goes: a London baker named Rich is said to have copied its stacked stages for a showpiece cake.