A Theme Park for the News

You thought Washington had enough museums. But this one could be different. It's certainly trying. Budgeted at $42 million and scheduled to open next April, the multimedia space - more a learning mall than a museum - promises to sharpen respect for the First Amendment and cultivate empathy for those who deliver the news. Underwritten by The Freedom Forum, the Newseum, as it is dubbed, in the clever argot of the age, wants to be cutting-edge on all counts, from the Internet cafe and live production studios to an impressive collection of archival data and a twenty-four-foot-high memorial to more than 900 journalists killed in the line of duty. The stainless steel and dichroic glass Freedom Forum Journalists Memorial will follow the recent resurgence in memorialization - "the sombering of America" - that has seen dedicated in Washington during the last couple of years a Korean War Memorial, a monument to American servicewomen, and a cairn in Arlington Cemetery erected for the victims of Pan Am 103.

 Twenty floors above the suburban Virginia community of Rosslyn, the Newseum's executive director, Peter Prichard, and assistants pass around the brittle front pages of yesterday's newspapers sheathed in plastic: a mining accident. Amelia Earhart lost in the Pacific. An exposé of the KKK. They're like a bunch of card dealers ogling old Mickey Mantles: they smirk at the overwritten leads, but flinch if you attempt to pull a page out of its jacket. Even with 40,000 square feet for exhibits ("sufficient for the subject," Prichard admits), Earhart and the Klan aren't both likely to make the final cut.

 Prichard, who was editor of USA Today from 1988 to 1994, feels he has a special knack for this job. "I came from one of the biggest single-copy circulation newspapers in the history of American journalism, and so I'm familiar with presentation techniques." In fact, the Newseum would like to become to its peers what USA Today has been to traditional dailies: a play for youth market share, a warning that not everyone wants to turn to an inside page to follow a story.

 On our way out the door Prichard hands me a hard hat. An elevator ride lands us in a conference room hung with blueprints and front pages blaring the O.J. verdict. We pull up a scale model of the Newseum, and he begins the Tour.

 Grand gestures will be a Newseum forte. Upstairs, a domed 220-seat theater with a twenty-foot-by-forty-foot screen will show an "uplifting" film on First Amendment values - "the only place," Prichard advises, "where we have a point of view." Nearby, a large globe will be decked with mottoes from almost every daily newspaper in the world (about 2,000), from the Birmingham Post Herald's "Covering Birmingham - Like Kudzu" to the Aspen Daily News's "If You Don't Want It Printed, Don't Let it Happen." The mottoes will be updated as papers are founded or, as is more likely the case in the world of media mergers and corporate downsizing, go belly up.

 Designed by Ralph Appelbaum and Associates, whose credits include the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Newseum presents history in a way that riffs on a familiar commandment: "the medium is the message." As the curved News History Wall unfolds on the third floor, Prichard demonstrates, the exhibits change format so that the story of the early press will be charted in print, while audiovisuals dominate after the birth of radio and television.

 The Wall is also peppered with both facts and questions, the latter answered by tour docents and educational staff. Should journalists take sides? Did W.R. Hearst help start the Spanish-American War? Should you believe something just because you read it in print? "We just take the same position that any newsperson would take," Prichard avows. "Explain the issue. Show the different points of view. And let visitors make up their minds."

Mini theaters across from the History Wall will show films on diversity, sensationalism, flaws in the press. Another will cover silver-screen reporters and the rise of the newsreel. Maintenance and promotion costs for such features are expected to run to several million dollars a year.

 Prichard offers me a look at what he calls the "major ‘Gee Whiz' exhibit." The News Wall, which will be a city block long dominated by a giant screen (125 feet long and twelve feet high) that can project thirty-six separate images representing "every significant satellite news feed in the world. . . . On days of big stories, like Oklahoma City or O.J., I think it will be hard to get people out of that video wall area," Prichard says. "It'll also be one of the world's best places to watch Sunday afternoon football," he adds with good-old-boy charm.

Visitors to the Interactive News Floor will also be able to play at the news; they can enter a simulated news van, choose location shots, put together a story. "They'll have deadline pressures," Prichard enthuses, and "ethical dilemmas to face." Some exhibits smack of gimmickry: "have your picture printed on a front page" (à la dime store photo booths) or "do a radio broadcast of a sports event you see on video" (reporter's karaoke). A reminder that the Newseum is going to be a place for working stiffs, too: there'll be (real) TV and radio studios for broadcasting public panels on media issues via C-SPAN, PBS, and other outlets.

 For all its way-out technology, the Newseum prospectus has a pretty conservative take on journalistic issues. For example, while government censorship will be an important exhibit theme, Prichard will say only that there "might" be a reference to heavily edited press coverage of the gulf war. And labor issues - step-parent Gannett and Knight-Ridder are involved in a messy strike at The Detroit News and Free Press - would be included, he allows, "if labor disputes were some big trend in the news media." As for the influence of newspaper chains like Gannett, Prichard's response is studiously diplomatic. "The two views are that it added professionalism or that it resulted in dollar newspapers that did less news," he says evenly. "You can have good monopoly owners and you can have bad monopoly owners."

 The visionary behind all this, according to Prichard, is Allen Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, who hired Prichard as his personal assistant nearly twenty years ago when he was c.e.o. of Gannett Co. "Neuharth certainly has backed the [Newseum]," grants Prichard, an allusion to the fact that his former boss is now chairman of the Freedom Forum - whose trustees have pledged millions to the project - not to mention chairman of the Newseum board itself. "Most museum directors spend eighty percent of their time raising money," Prichard reflects. "And Freedom Forum doesn't even accept financial contributions."

 The Forum is the offspring of the Gannett Newspaper Foundation (GNF), funded by Frank Gannett in 1935 to spread corporate good cheer in the towns served by his - then - modest newspaper chain. Neuharth, who had been c.e.o. of Gannett Co. since 1979, stepped down in 1989 to turn his full efforts to the foundation, which he had also headed since 1986. His first act was to sell back to Gannett $670 million in company stock owned by GNF so as to create an independent foundation dedicated to media studies - with himself at the helm. Today, Neuharth's Freedom Forum has more than $800 million in diversified assets. In 1994 it counted a net investment income of $27 million, and last year more than triple that.

 The relationship between Gannett Co. (owner of ninety-two daily newspapers, eleven radio stations, and fifteen TV stations) and the Newseum is - officially - nil. "The only link that we have," avers Prichard, "is that a lot of us used to work for Gannett - but that's it." Six of fourteen Freedom Forum trustees (not to mention Prichard himself) are former Gannett editors and executives; another, the journalist Carl Rowan, also serves on the Gannett board. (Freedom Forum owns 10,000 shares of Gannett stock, which is less than 1 percent of its total investments.)

 "Flash followed by fluff," scoffs John Hartman, professor of journalism at Central Michigan University, when I ask him about the museum. Hartman has been an observer of Gannett and its offspring since researching his book, The USA Today Way, which appeared in 1992. Admitting that the museum is "not a bad idea," Hartman thinks he recognizes another motive behind the project: "self-aggrandizement" by Neuharth.

 Prichard, naturally, focuses on the "not a bad idea" part. "There's nowhere in the world where journalism is remembered in a historical way," Prichard proclaims by the end of my visit. "It's going to be the greatest collection of newspapers, and news artifacts, and news objects anywhere." His benediction is no less stirring: "There are a lot of people here who really risked their lives and their livelihood to tell the truth. Maybe that's a tradition worth having in this country."

But will the Newseum be able to celebrate an industry and give it a serious working-over at the same time?

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