“ We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of quizzes,” Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, told the Columbia Journalism Review, in 2014. “You won’t find any viral, digital quizzes from Harper’s.” BuzzFeed appeared to represent the future of the industry-“ the most influential news organization in America today,” according to an April, 2015, piece in The Atlantic, which noted the fame of its “silly quizzes”-which raised the possibility that perhaps the quiz was poised to become a new journalistic form. “BuzzFeed’s quizzes are a fine example of a product other media competitors can’t compete with,” a story in the Washington Post insisted, a few months later, after BuzzFeed raised fifty million dollars from investors. But its sudden online dominance seemed to pose an existential question for more traditional outlets. “ A quiz is not, generally speaking, journalism,” a writer at NiemanLab pointed out, in a piece headlined “Are quizzes the new lists? What BuzzFeed’s latest viral success means for publishing.” The quiz is also not a new form, the writer noted it was, along with comics and cartoons and crosswords, the sort of diversion that had long accompanied the news.
When BuzzFeed quizzes-“What City Should You Live In?” “Which Al Roker Am I?” and so on-seemed to take over the Internet, five years ago, many veteran journalists and media critics weren’t sure what to make of them.