Making Newseum

Making Newseum

By Joelle Seligson

This article was published in Museum, July/August issue 2008.

The Newseum knows how to tell a story. The attention-grabbing lead: A massive high-definition screen flashing images of news icons and events, visible from the street through the museum’s 57-foot glass facade. The essential nut graf: A collection of more than 30,000 historic newspapers, tracing nearly five centuries of news. Throughout its narrative, the Newseum attempts to show—not tell—the history of journalism. Its 6,214 artifacts include a 40-foot-tall Berlin Wall guard tower, a 3,000-year-old clay cuneiform brick and a replicated news chopper suspended 90 feet in the air, all within one building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

What a building it is, brimming with statistics and superlatives. It cost $450 million to construct the 643,00-square-foot structure—which includes office and residential spaces—ranking it among the world’s most expensive museums. Given its two television studios, 15 theaters and 130 interactive stations, CEO Charles Overby is probably right to deem his institution the most technologically advanced in the world.

The Newseum, as you have every right to expect, knows how to make headlines. And so it has, repeatedly throughout the six years it took to move across the Potomac River from its original location in Rosslyn, Va. Given the media response surrounding the museum’s opening in April, it’s a good thing this glass house is reinforced. The criticisms have ranged from mild to scathing. Washington Post staff writer Howard Kurtz called the Newseum “a first-class addition to the capital’s cultural institutions”—as well as “an overpriced monument to journalistic self-glorification.” Jack Shafer, editor-at-large of the online magazine Slate.com, condemned it as a “seven-story, steel-and-glass monument to journalistic vanity” in an article titled “Down with the Newseum!”

Indeed, many journalists have shunned the Newseum as an undesired, unwarranted pat on the back, as more of a tribute than a museum. “The Newseum . . . succumbs to a familiar and exaggerated form of press self-regard, cloaking the press in a virtuous mantle of public service,” wrote New York Times critic Edward Rothstein. Other shared misgivings include the cost of the museum’s construction (and its $20 admission); its multimillionaire, media-friendly funders; and its technology-driven, theme park-like approach.

The Newseum’s staff, largely composed of former members of the press, has tried to assuage the qualms. Perhaps anticipating scrutiny, employees memorized a few carefully constructed catchphrases: “We’re not a hall of fame.” “We did not build this museum for journalists.” “We show the full history of journalism, warts and all.”

The bulk of the history is in the News Corporation News History Gallery, the largest of the museum’s 14 galleries. A “spine” containing thousands of historic newspapers, newsbooks, plates and magazines stretches down the center of the hall, spanning from the 14th century to the 21st. Visitors circle the structure, reading headlines (“‘All Passengers Are Safe’: Report from Titanic” proclaims a 1912 issue of the LA Express), pulling out climate-controlled glass drawers to inspect the aged documents and engaging touch-screen monitors that call up the papers digitally.

Even in this low-lit cavern, there is constant stimulation, a dizzying array of videos, photos, text and artifacts. Audio loops constantly in the background from five sidebar theaters that adjoin the rectangular room. It’s hard to know where to turn or look first—much like today’s constant media whirl.

Lining the walls are eight glass display cases tracing trends in news history, from technological developments to sensationalism to women and minorities’ struggle to break into the field. The panels heave with objects: the door that burglars taped open at the Watergate Hotel, Ana Marie “Wonkette” Cox’s blue bedroom slippers, a stuffed carrier pigeon.
Here we also spy the “warts.” One panel, “Mistakes Are Made,” details the Orlando Sentinel’s faulty reports on the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. “Out-and-Out Lies” posts headshots and briefly outlines the sins of Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley and others who abandoned the unwritten journalistic oath to tell the truth.

“This is not a temple to journalists,” reminds Susan Bennett, vice president of marketing and deputy director, as well as a veteran editor and reporter who spent time as a national correspondent for Knight Ridder newspapers. “We know what the public opinion polls say about the people’s trust or lack thereof of the media, so we talk in many exhibits about bias, about using unnamed sources and about actual misconduct by journalists.”

The “Lies” display is perhaps one-third as large as the “News as Entertainment” panel next to it, which is accompanied by a video compilation of hilarious (and distracting) “news” clips from Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report and Laugh-In. Whether or not the humor break was strategically placed, it makes it easy to glide past the low points without too much reflection. (More time can be spent pondering journalistic blunders in the bathrooms. The walls—and stalls—are marked with examples of editorial mishaps, such as a 1981 Minneapolis Tribune headline that announced “Defendant’s Speech Ends in Long Sentence.”)

Regardless of how effectively they come across, the Newseum should receive “absolutely no credit” for its efforts to acknowledge journalism’s dark side, in Shafer’s opinion. “That’s a given. It’s called a corrections column,” he says in a phone interview. “Ours is a very fallible business. If you tried to persuade me that you were an admirable person because you had confessed to an error, I would say, ‘hooey.’ It’s part of what we do. We wear the hairshirt when we need to.”
Another of the staff’s repeated sentiments is that the Newseum, despite the pun, is less focused on news than it is on the role of a free press in a free society. It is the largest operation of the Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan foundation Freedom Forum, established by USA Today founder Allen H. Neuharth in 1991 as the successor to a foundation created by publisher Frank E. Gannett in 1935. The foundation, supported by income from an endowment of diversified assets, is dedicated to “free press, free speech and free spirit for all people”—in other words, to spreading the word of the First Amendment.

The Newseum shares this objective. “Our press freedoms are protected by the First Amendment, and the First Amendment and the news media are two greatly misunderstood freedoms,” says Joe Urschel, executive director and senior vice president, who came to the Newseum after 14 years at USA Today. “The Pew Center did a study recently and found that many, many more Americans can name the five members of the Simpsons family than can name the five freedoms in the First Amendment. That’s not too scandalous or surprising, but we think the numbers ought to be a bit closer together.” In fact, knowing the five freedoms—ahem: that’s press, speech, assembly, petition and religion—is a prerequisite for employment at the museum.

In case this proves problematic, there’s a gentle reminder in the form of a 50-ton slab of Tennessee marble on the museum’s facade, etched with the full text of the amendment for employees—and future inaugural parades—to view and remember. It’s one of the building’s more literal odes to a free press. The glass wall behind it is meant to represent transparency, a “window on the world” that places, at least metaphorically, no barrier between the public and the media.

Actually entering the museum is another matter. For a museum obsessed with all things free, admission is anything but: $20 for adults, $13 for children. (The Washington Post will sponsor free admission for area school groups during the museum’s first year.) Order online and another $3 or so is tacked on as a service charge. It’s hard to compare this to sister institutions in D.C., the land of free museums. But, Newseum staff is quick to point out, their museum doesn’t receive tax dollars. “If you believe the Smithsonian is free, you haven’t looked at your pay stub recently,” Overby asserts.

Besides, Overby adds, the nearby International Spy Museum costs $18 and receives 750,000 visitors annually. And the newly opened Madame Tussauds wax museum, also just a few blocks away, costs a cool $21.15.

Celebrities play nearly as big a role at the Newseum as at Madame’s. The 40-by-22-foot screen in the opening Great Hall of News flashes images of newsmakers from the Dalai Lama to Will and Jada Pinkett Smith. Famous faces also pepper a looping video in the First Amendment Gallery. Some make sense—Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, for example. Martin “President Bartlet” Sheen also can be explained, albeit more loosely. But the reason LL Cool J was chosen to discuss freedom of religion while M.C. Hammer’s hit “Can’t Touch This” plays in the background is not immediately obvious.

Not every gallery is so festive, as discovered on the museum’s lower levels. Visitors are encouraged to ride the museum’s great glass elevators to the top floor, take in the downtown vista from the sixth-story terrace, then work their way down the museum’s 1.5-mile exhibit route. The fourth-floor 9/11 Gallery provides a sobering moment with its centerpiece: the top 35 feet of the 360-foot antenna mast that once crowned the World Trade Center North Tower, where it served most of New York City’s television and radio stations and formed Manhattan’s highest point. It is now a gnarled coil of charred metal, a visceral representation of the damage done.

The Journalists Memorial is a bit more clinical. Twenty-four panels of thick glass reaching 36 feet high are inscribed with names of more than 1,800 journalists who have perished on the job since 1837. Nearly 100 of these are from last year alone; morbidly but unavoidably, rows have been left open to add future names. Yet even here there’s not much room for quiet contemplation. Every few minutes, the bass beat of “Can’t Touch This” rings obtrusively from the First Amendment Gallery above.

Being “noisy” was one of the goals for the new Newseum, explains renowned exhibit designer Ralph Applebaum, whose past projects include the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark., and D.C.’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The original version didn’t have enough room for socialization. “We encourage a social dialogue. It’s a great metaphor for us,” he said.

Newseum 1.0 was a pilot project, a modest, relatively metaphor-free structure one-fifth the size of the new one. Its location in the Virginia suburbs left something to be desired. “We got very few drop-in visitors. If somebody came to Rosslyn, they came to see the museum or they were lost looking for Arlington Cemetery,” Bennett recollects. But the interactive exhibits proved to be a big draw. The museum received 500,000 visitors annually, far exceeding expectations.

This figure pales in comparison to the numbers already welcomed at the new Newseum. While executives are reluctant to offer attendance projections for the museum’s first year, nearly 11,000 visitors waited in lines curling around the Canadian Embassy next door on April 11, its confetti- and celebrity-filled opening day. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg were among the orators at its dedication ceremony. The Source, the museum’s upscale Wolfgang Puck restaurant, had a half-hour wait as soon as it began serving lunch.

Then again, opening day was—like the first Newseum—free. Once the admission fee was officially instated, the lines dwindled. One local woman who bought advance tickets was surprised to find the museum relatively empty on April 12. “There were only four people waiting in line for the caricaturist!” she exclaimed.

As before, though, the interactive stations were heavily populated. The Newseum’s embrace of technology is a nod both to today’s rapidly evolving media and to an evolving understanding. “We learned from the first Newseum that to effectively reach today’s museum visitor you have to integrate media at every stage of the experience,” notes Paul Sparrow, vice president of broadcasting, programs and education.

The biggest attraction at Newseum 1.0 allowed visitors to test their skills as TV reporters, reciting mock news announcements off a teleprompter. The new iteration has retained and ramped up this feature. Standing in a Be a TV Reporter station in the NBC News Interactive Newsroom, novice broadcasters are projected on virtual backdrops that place them in front of the White House or on the steps of the Pentagon. Whereas in the first museum participants were handed a tape of their performance, they now receive a photograph and a code to download the video on the Newseum’s website. (It now also costs an additional $8 to Be a TV Reporter.)

In the nearby Ethics Center, two teams of players standing around the Ethics Table wave their hands over the table’s infrared screen to control tiny avatars and answer questions of journalistic morals. The questions range from obvious to debatable: If a principal’s toupee flies off while he’s giving a speech, do you report it? (The answer: Yes, because it reflects the process of journalism—but be fair.)

The Newseum considers interactive elements critical to holding visitors’ attention in a Web 2.0 world, as well as to accomplishing another institutional objective: improving public opinion of the media. It gives visitors “an appreciation for the hard decisions that have to be made every day in journalism,” says Bennett. “Oftentimes the mistakes are made not because of some menacing plot but because of deadlines.” After a few minutes reading off a teleprompter or deciding how to edit a photograph, she hopes visitors will realize that “with deadline pressure, with ethical dilemmas, sometimes I might make a mistake. We like to think that they’ll come away with a better appreciation of how we work.”

The Newseum has nearly 24 hours’ worth of video, in at least 100 different productions. (The museum’s nerve center, which monitors its entire scope of electronic media, rivals a small NASA control room in complexity.) The lineup includes a 4-D movie that’s the stuff of Disney World attractions. Virtual bullets spiral toward the audience, outfitted with plastic glasses, as an Edward R. Murrow stand-in ducks enemy fire while reporting from a London rooftop during World War II. When a cruel, gargantuan nurse smashes a roach during mealtime in Bellevue Hospital—under the watchful eye of undercover reporter Nellie Bly—water sprays at viewers to simulate the bug’s guts.

Also among the footage are snippets on the Newseum’s 14 founding partners—including Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bloomberg News, Hearst Corporation, Cox Enterprises and more of the most notable names in media—who collectively committed $122 million to the institution. Each partner has a kiosk stationed in front of the gallery bearing its name. Touch the inset monitor and a video plays, detailing the funder’s role in shaping and supporting journalism.

Staff repeatedly emphasizes that the founding partners had no influence over the museum’s content or layout. “It was discreet fundraising, a very low-key campaign, and all of that was done after the gallery content was in,” Bennett maintains. “They had no review, no input of gallery content.”

So what to make of the fact that a bullet-ridden truck that shielded Time magazine journalists in Sarajevo is the largest artifact in the Time Warner World News Gallery—overshadowing such artifacts as Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s passport? “I don’t know 100 percent that it’s completely coincidental, but I do know the exhibits were settled long before anyone had settled on being a partner for that gallery,” says curator Carrie Christofferson.

In any case, while all journalists try to find a new angle, this may not be one. Private museums are on the rise, with invested parties (and investors) making curatorial calls. “The Newseum suffers from the fact that curatorial power is invested in the home team,” Shafer wrote for Slate.com. “You don’t think News Corp. and the Sulzbergers would lend their names and money to an enterprise that would sink a shiv into the press, do you?”

Still, museums remain one of America’s most trusted sources of information, according to a February study by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. A recent national poll by Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., on the other hand, revealed that just 19.6 percent of Americans believe most news reporting today, compared to 27.4 percent in 2003. If, like the Newseum, museums follow the media’s trend of increased corporate funding, are they too at risk of losing the public trust?

Martha Morris, associate professor at George Washington University’s museum studies program in Washington, D.C., doubts it is much of an issue. “I know there’s a lot of corporate support, so you’ll see the names of corporations all over the building, which drives me crazy, but that’s true of so many museums these days,” she says. “I don’t think the public’s going to notice the difference. What the public will be upset about, of course, is if they think it’s too expensive. . . . It’s a new museum, and it needs to be given the opportunity to succeed and to see what the public says.”

Morris isn’t any more troubled by the Newseum’s subject matter of the news and First Amendment, calling it “a wonderful thing to focus on.” Not so for critics who take issue with the Newseum’s treatment of journalists as celebrities, bastardizing their role as storytellers by making them the story itself, enshrining their recorders and notebooks as relics instead of mere tools of the trade. “One introductory film tells visitors: War is news, peace is news; love is news, hate is news; life is news, death is news. Nothing is not news, and its chroniclers take on heroic status here,” wrote Rothstein in the New York Times.

But the Newseum’s collection isn’t limited to the personal effects of professional journalists. After all, key reporters are no longer just a few talking heads. The Internet, TV and Radio Gallery ends its display with the Nokia cell phone used by Virginia Tech student Jamal Albarghouti to capture the pixilated footage of the shootings that was picked up and shown around the world. Today, anyone equipped with a digital camera or a blog is a journalist, while the “official” media—including the companies that contributed millions to the Newseum—continue to consolidate and downsize. Such is acknowledged on the institution’s very walls. “Advertising revenue is moving to the Web,” states one. “The mantra in many newsrooms is ‘do more with less.’ No one knows how the story will unfold.”

The uncertain state of affairs raises questions about how the Newseum’s backers view their once-omnipotent positions in the news business, and their reasons for funding a museum that memorializes the media even as it celebrates it. It has also led some to wonder—as one reporter asked Overby at the press preview—whether the Newseum is chronicling a dying industry. “We’re not chronicling any industry,” Overby responded. “This is the Newseum, not the newspaperseum, not the faltering mediaseum. We chronicle the delivery system. . . . We’ll let others get into the faltering economics.”

As with the state of the media, any conclusions about the Newseum’s future have yet to be made. But at the press preview, President Peter Prichard did provide journalists with a stirring final quote. “The Newseum will, over the years, remind us of enduring truths,” he said. “That the hunger for information has never burned brighter throughout the world. . . . That we need a free democracy to ensure a free press. . . . That those who bring us the news every day have every reason to be proud of what they have done and what they will do.”