In 13 years of running Interact, the largest quiz platform in the world by volume, I’ve seen two different types of Journalistic quizzes repeat over and over again to great success.
The first one is the “How much do you actually know about this topic?” quiz. Where you use our trivia style, knowledge test format to ask people questions about a topic and then they see if they know the answer. You can show them the answer immediately, right after each question, or hold the answers until the end, giving them an answer key with their scores. You can also show people different results depending on how many answers they get correct. It’s a fun way to bring the data to life, and see how well people know the subject. For the quiz taker, it appeals to that Jeopardy-like instinct within all of us that wants to see how smart we are.
Columbia University uses Interact quizzes to run a monthly news quiz in this style. They ask trivia questions about recent events within the University, then you can answer and see how much you know. It’s a really smart way to add interactivity to the content and involve the reader in the stories.
The other format of quiz I’ve seen work well in Journalism is the personality or archetype quiz, used to bring people into the stories by assigning them to a character in the story. This one has been used a lot within historical journalism, where you can connect back to events by seeing which character you would be.
Booker Prizes uses this quiz type to bring books to life. You take the quiz to find out which Booker Prize finalist book you are. I’ve seen this done for famous historical women, famous figures from the Bible, famous generals, and the list goes on.
Journalists use quizzes to add interactivity to their journalism by letting readers test their knowledge of the journalistic subject, or by allowing users to connect to a character in the story being covered by taking a personality type quiz that applies to the story being covered.