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More
than 500 front pages of world newspapers
updated daily, a magnificent view of the U.S.
Capitol from the terrace, Wolfgang Puck-inspired
lunch selections, a piece of the Berlin Wall and
the ultimate widescreen will make the Newseum a
hit with visitors from its opening this week for
decades to come. With a 74-foot high engraving of
the First Amendment highlighting the exterior and
250,000 square feet of exhibition space spread
over seven levels, the “world’s most
interactive museum” justifies the Freedom
Forum’s decision to move the Newseum from its
cramped location in Arlington years ago and become
a prominent Pennsylvania Avenue neighbor of the
Embassy of Canada and the National Gallery of Art.
As is the case with any great museum, the Newseum
chronicles the past -- the rise of news and the
importance of information flows over the last 500
years -- and hints at a future less reliant on
printing presses. As should be the case with any
American institution, it documents the critical
contributions made to press freedoms and the
journalistic profession by American publishers,
editors and reporters. The sponsors read like a
Who’s Who of American journalism: The New York
Times, the Ochs-Sulzberger family, News
Corporation, NBC News, Time Warner, Hearst
Corporation, ABC News, Knight, Annenberg, Cox.
There are Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs,
editorial cartoons and the comics. The memorial to
the more than 1,800 journalists who have died
while chasing the news is sobering.
The Newseum adopted some strong core messages to
guide the development of its galleries, exhibits
and films. The free press is a cornerstone of
democracy. People have a need to know. Journalists
have a right to tell. Finding the facts can be
difficult. Reporting the story can be dangerous.
Freedom includes the right to be outrageous.
Responsibility includes the duty to be fair. News
is history in the making. Journalists provide the
first draft of history. A free press, at its best,
reveals the truth.
Yet, even as the Newseum documents just how much
of the past newspapers occupy as a prime news and
information delivery system, it also suggests how
little of the future may belong to them. Newspaper
circulation drops are well chronicled from peaks
25 years ago. 2007 print advertising revenue
figures from the Newspaper Association of America
show the biggest drop since 1950, the year the
association started tracking annual print
advertising revenue.
The Newspaper Association also documents Internet
ad revenue for newspaper web sites growing to $3.2
billion in 2007. While not enough to replacing
print advertising losses, Internet ad revenues
have crept up to 7.5 percent of total newspaper ad
revenues. The question for publishers, editors and
journalists facing the Internet, bloggers and
24-hour television news is whether
newspaper-centered corporations can make the
transition fast enough to keep themselves in the
news business. It’s a problem that even Tysons
Corner-headquartered Gannett Company, Inc.,
publisher of USA TODAY, 84 other daily newspapers
and 23 television stations, is trying to tackle
with readership metrics that extend beyond raw
readership to the "quality" of
readership, as in, the willingness of readers to
buy what advertisers offer.
One print journalist who covers Virginia and
Washington, D.C. suggests that along with great
history comes great uncertainty. “I honestly
have no idea where we'll be in five years,” she
offered in a recent discussion. “The industry
has to continue to contract for a little while
longer, but the market for content will still be
in demand, just not on paper. I have some
confidence that our business side recognizes the
urgency of figuring out how to continue making
money without broadsheet presses and
advertisements.”
The most alluring interactive displays in the
Newseum, in fact, relate to television news.
Visitors even have the chance to “get on the
air, live.” A copy of Thomas Paine’s “Common
Sense,” colonial era pamphlets and examples of
the great American newspapers that emerged in the
1800s are there, of course, hundreds of pages in
pull out displays that let one readily imagine
just how precious a copy of the news of the day
might have been to people not otherwise that well
connected to a rapidly changing world. But the
Newseum devotes its greatest spaces to radio,
television and the Internet and the changes that
spoken words, dramatic images and instant
connections have made in exactly what constitutes
news in the first place. Even the slightly lumpy
“Newshound” mascot for kids carries a
microphone, not a notepad.
For the television generation, it’s all there --
from clips of John Cameron Swayze (news anchor and
wristwatch pitchman) and Huntley-Brinkley to the
death of the news reels and “Weekend Update”
with Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin. For the Internet
and wireless generation, there are reminders that
technology itself always has driven news and news
coverage. And there are pointed reminders
everywhere of the importance of free flows in
information and news -- over, under and around the
Berlin Wall, for example, and past would-be
censors in every country, including the United
States.
The Newseum opens to the public April 11. And that
is news.
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April 7, 2008
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