What type of friend are you? Evergreen, Wallflower, Butterfly, or Firefly?
If you’re not sure—and if you’re puzzled by how those categories are defined—then you can find out by taking this quiz published by The New York Times earlier this month. Answer the 10 questions and the interactive webpage will assign you one of the four “friendship style” characterizations. (I’m an Evergreen.)
Do you talk like a boomer in the workplace? A quiz on The Washington Post’s website can answer that for you by asking, among other questions, whether you’d respond to a colleague’s joke with a skull emoji, a laughing emoji, an “LOL,” or by saying “that was funny.” (Apparently I’m a millennial-Gen X hybrid with a touch of Gen Z.)
We can trace the rise in popularity of these now-ubiquitous digital questionnaires back to BuzzFeed, whose mass-produced, viral personality quizzes dominated the internet of the 2010s. Widely regarded as a guilty pleasure among their adult audiences and parodied by more “serious” publications, the questionnaires—heavy on photos, spare on text—offered readers tailored answers derived from seemingly arbitrary sets of queries. You could learn which 2016 trend you embody by identifying which snacks you prefer, or you could learn which cartoon bear you most identify with based on which sights you’d most like to see on a trip to London.
The explosion in popularity of online quizzes has a lot to do with the era in which they were born; the early 2010s were rife with experimentation on media websites. Brands innovated with new forms of digital storytelling typified by The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize–winning interactive story “Snowfall,” which was considered a major feat in digital journalism when it was published at the end of 2012. The following year, The Times’ most visited story was a quiz titled “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk,” a questionnaire which shed light on the dialectical differences between regions across the US. The popularity of the dialect quiz received significant media attention—much of which revealed anxieties regarding the supremacy of a quiz over conventional news articles.
Despite the hand-wringing, the Times’ dialect test proved that quizzes can convey the same amount of information as traditional news articles and that they have the potential to further contextualize the news for readers in a more engaging way.
“A lot of people will roll their eyes instantly and say there's nothing that video games have to do with news media, and that to try to bring those two together as farcical and silly and ridiculous,” says David Dowling, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa and the author of The Gamification of Digital Journalism. “Once you start to drop those preconceptions about what news is and can be, then we get into an understanding of how technology can really help us rather than hurt us.”
Pressing Engagement
Today, a rich assortment of digital content lives alongside the traditional stories you’ll find on news websites and inside news apps: games; interactive graphs, charts, and maps; and, of course, quizzes are all commonplace. And often, these interactive elements encourage you to read those run-of-the-mill articles; Slate, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are among publications that publish frequent (in some cases, daily) quizzes that test readers on their knowledge of the respective publication’s reporting. Even some of The New York Times’ games are accompanied by corresponding quizzes.
While some quizzes exist purely to get you to stick around and click on stuff—even news quizzes pump engagement and encourage you to share your results with your friends—these nontraditional news formats also provide added value to the consumer. Dowling says that, beyond their value as a marketing tool, the chase for clicks “threw fuel on the fire of narrative innovation.”
“You can bring investigative fervor and intent and substance within the context of an interactive that's asking people questions,” Dowling says.
Patti Wolter, a journalism professor at Northwestern University, describes quizzes as a form of service journalism. “I would applaud quizzes that have reporting and information embedded in them,” she says. “All we're talking about is, what is the wrapper or the packaging that makes it more likely for the reader to engage? In a world in which every kind of media, news or otherwise, is really hunting for different ways of getting people to click it, being creative around story format is a strong strategy.”
In fact, the quiz format in particular may prove to be a better way to tell certain stories, according to Dowling. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal published a poll titled “What Type of Voter Are You?” to share findings from a research study. The Washington Post published “Can You Spot Bad Financial Advice on TikTok?” to draw attention to, and help readers identify, potentially harmful misinformation on social media.
Publishing information in the form of a quiz can also add depth to the scope of the reporting, Dowling says. “It forces a varied look at things. Your quiz is going to have some sort of an output that tells you that there are other ways that others could have answered that quiz. And so the sociological takeaway, I think, is diversifying. I think it's healthy because I got to think about myself vis-a-vis others.”
Social Studies
The omnipresence of online quizzes also gives the news media a way to combat one of its most pressing challenges: the mass migration of readers to social media. The same institutions pushing quizzes are slowly losing their audiences to social platforms, where news is just one of the many content types on offer.
According to a study from Pew published in April, 43 percent of American TikTok users say they get their news on TikTok. Pew also reported, in February, that those who get their news on social media cite convenience as the primary benefit. “If, on any given day, I want to know what’s happening in the Middle East, I want to know what’s going on with Congress, I'm looking for a new recipe, I’m looking for a creative way to work out,” says Wolter, “any given media outlet wants me to satisfy as many, many of those items on their site.”
According to the same Pew study, 40 percent of Americans who get news from social media expressed concern about the potential for inaccurate information. In theory, a news publication’s use of diverse storytelling formats should offer the same one-stop-shop convenience as social media, but provide content produced with high editorial standards.
Migration to social media indicates a failure on the part of the journalism industry to reclaim the connection with readers that's been co-opted by social media, says Rawiya Kameir, an assistant professor of journalism at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. “There’s an absence, in a lot of publications, of community in a comment section or other kinds of direct engagement that we see on social,” she says, which exposes a need to “figure out how to capture community and bring it back to the publications themselves.”
Quizzes generally deal with lighthearted topics, giving readers permission to momentarily abandon the often distressing news cycle and engage in some introspection, even within the context of the news. The Washington Post’s “Are You Ready to Buy a House?” quiz, for example, informs readers of relevant bits of news related to homeownership, like the current mortgage rate and the percentage of homes bought in cash.
“We forget that a lot of people also turn to these publications for entertainment and for enlightenment and for things other than pure life-or-death information,” says Kameir. “From the reader's perspective, the benefits of quizzes are multifold. They're fun, they're engaging. They are a way to understand ourselves and each other a little bit better.”
