You know that triumphant feeling that sweeps from your brain to your toes when one of your enemies stumbles and falls into a mass of his own excrement? Such delight overwhelmed me yesterday as the Newseum—that gilded monument to journalistic vanity just a half-mile from the U.S. Capitol—hoisted its flag of surrender in the form of a press release. The Newseum owners can no longer afford to subsidize the place, they say, and are exploring plans to sell all or part of the building.
If the Newseum goes down, it will have deserved its death. Truth be told, it never deserved birth. Its owner, the Freedom Forum foundation, spent $450 million building its palace of journalism in 2008, making the Newseum among the most expensive museums then under construction. Featuring a facade constructed from 50 tons of Tennessee marble, the seven-level structure has sought to commemorate the news business by stuffing its exhibits with 60,000-plus baubles and artifacts from the trade.
Newseum exhibits often resemble the detritus from a flea market. It has been or is home to Wonkette’s slippers, the Watergate break-in door, Tim Russert’s office, posters and reporters’ notebooks from the Ferguson protests, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold’s legal pads, Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs’ eyeglasses (broken when candidate Greg Gianforte body-slammed him), an Ai Weiwei self-portrait, props and costumes from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, a Boston Globe reporter’s running shoes, hundreds of press passes, Walt Mossberg’s gadgets, Bono’s jacket, and much more.
Other artifacts displayed at the Newseum seem like liquidation items purchased by a crazed curator—a satellite truck, a satellite replica, a Bell news helicopter, a Berlin Wall guard tower, a car belonging to a 9/11 hijacker, and the Unabomber’s shack, for example. Exactly how random curios like these tell the story of journalism has been the Newseum’s conceptual problem from the day it opened its doors. You can’t drop the history of news in a box like you can the airplanes and rockets in the neighboring National Air and Space Museum. Journalism is a living thing, like an ocean tide—its energies dissipate when sealed in Lucite for display.
The Newseum designers knew going in that journalistic gimcracks would never be enough of a draw alone, which explains why they tarted up the seven-level structure with high-tech interactive exhibits and 15 theaters. Alas, running the “highly technical, interactive experience” has proved ruinous to the Newseum’s budget, as the white-flag press release declares. At $24.95 a ticket, the Newseum can’t attract enough paying customers to continue. What’s more, the Newseum’s financial crisis isn’t news to anybody who has followed its fortunes. As early as 2001, as the building took shape, the American Journalism Review issued a warning about the Freedom Forum’s shrinking endowment. Charles Overby, its then-chairman and CEO, discounted those worries. “The Newseum is going to attract more than a million people each year,” he said. Fact check: The Newseum now attracts only 800,000 a year.
If you had the Newseum to do all over again—and at today’s velocity, that might soon be a reality—what would you do differently? To begin with, the Freedom Forum gave it a ridiculous name. Say it out loud and see for yourself. Next, if what they wanted was a sustainable museum, why did they build it on the most expensive ($100 million) plot of land available? Why did they have to build a tabernacle to journalism when a poured concrete building would have kept their precious artifacts dry? Reprising a theme from above, what made them think of telling the story of journalism with a series of rotating exhibits and films in the first place? It’s not like the Newseum hadn’t test-driven its concept before landing adjacent to the Mall. From 1997 until 2002, the Newseum called a more modest, smaller building across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, its home. The Newseum was crap there, too, just smaller crap, proving that location, location, location does not a museum make. If the Newseum still possesses that 3,262-year-old cuneiform brick or other items of historical importance, it would be doing us all a favor by putting the stash in a U-Haul van and wheeling it down to one of the free national museums on the Mall where it could be preserved.
Newseum loyalists—and they do exist—will lecture you on the symbolic value, especially in the era of Trump, of having a building facing the U.S. Capitol that has the words to the First Amendment carved into its face. Surely worthy. But $450 million worthy? Like journalism prizes, the Newseum is a monument to the news business’ high self-regard, built largely with the money tossed into Freedom Forum’s coffers by Gannett (when Gannett printed money) and by other corporate journalism sponsors, such as ABC, Hearst, Time Warner, NBC, the Bancroft family, News Corp., Bloomberg, Cox, the New York Times and the Annenberg fortune. Say what you will about journalism prizes—and I have—at least they instill ambition in the sort of editors and reporters who need the promise of a trophy as a reason to get up in the morning. The Newseum, on the other hand, hasn’t inspired a journalist of my acquaintance. Instead, its theme park approach to our trade has dispirited them.
When the Newseum opened in 2008, I urged the Freedom Forum to sell the space at the earliest opportunity and spend the proceeds on producing journalism today, not preserving journalism from the past. My advice still holds.
******
The only thing the Newseum has going for it is its daily collection of front pages from around the country. Do you need a $450 million building to do that? What would you do with the Newseum if you bought it? Send proposals to [email protected]. My email alerts visited the Newseum a couple of weeks ago for a book party. My Twitter feed once participated in a Slate event there. My RSS feed attended a company-wide POLITICO meeting there once but ditched early because of the bad vibes.
