The $450 million Newseum, “the most technologically advanced and most interactive museum in the world,” is an ambitious effort to imbue the public with a sense of awe and appreciation for the role of a vigorous free press, museumofficials said Tuesday.
“We did not build this museum for journalists — we built it for the 20 million people who visit Washington every year,” Newseum CEO Charles Overby said as he gave reporters a sneak peek at the facility that will open Friday. “They come to visit the monuments to freedom and democracy, and we believe that the press belongs in that pilgrimage.”
The glass-encased building, with the First Amendment writ large in marble on its exterior, houses 15 sleek theaters playing 120 original films, including a documentary about the journalists who covered the fall of the World Trade Center Buildings on Sept. 11, 2001.
That theater sits beside a display of the last digital pictures taken by the only photojournalist who was killed when the towers fell, the Sept. 12 front pages of 87 newspapers, and a 31-foot section of the antenna that sat atop the North Tower. The exhibit is typical of the Newseum, where high ceilings, open spaces and cutting-edge technology blend with traditional museum artifacts to lend a sense of grandeur to the storytelling.
Early reviews of the facility have been largely positive. Still, critics have sounded sour notes at the $20-per-person entrance fee, what some have seen as a self-congratulatory tone to the exhibits, and the concept of spending nearly half a billion dollars on a monument to journalism when the industry is struggling.
That aside, the museum’s 14 galleries display remnants of some of journalism’s best moments, such as Bob Woodward‘s scribbled Watergate notes, along with tributes to free speech in pop culture, as in a large image of Bart Simpson writing “The First Amendment does not cover burping” on a school blackboard.
It also houses an extensive collection of historic publications. Visitors can read the original pages documenting the 1692 Salem witch trials or learn that the July 2, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post carried a two-line scoop that Congress had approved separation from Britain.
Flat-screen monitors are woven throughout the museum, some of them playing archived news footage from key historical moments, and some encouraging visitors to play digital quiz games or leave their comments about a specific gallery.
The most interactive gallery is a 7,000-square-foot mock newsroom that features 48 kiosks with journalism role-playing games and eight “Be A TV Reporter” stations.
For an extra $8 dollars, visitors read a teleprompted news report and are digitally superimposed in front of the White House, Capitol building or another famous location. Shy reporters beware — the “news reports” loop on the exhibit’s televisions afterward.
The Newseum, which was a project seven years in the making, is meant to be experienced from the top down, beginning with the sixth-floor exhibits on the origins of journalism.
Overby rejects the criticism that the museum is a multimilliondollar ode to a dying industry.
“This is a newseum — it’s not a newspaper-seum, it’s not a faltering-media-seum,” he said. “It’s about chronicling the events of our lives.”
