March 24, 2008

A Night at the Newseum

I was privileged to join a group of bloggers, along with TV news executives and personnel from the Washington DC area, for a reception and private tour of the soon-to-open Newseum in the nation's capital. In a word, it is spectacular. The Freedom Forum, which built the $450 million interactive museum dedicated to the profession of journalism and to the First Amendment, has created an experience that is, by turns, educational, entertaining and deeply moving as it focuses on the history of journalism and the five freedoms of the First Amendment here in America and also places them in context within a broader sweep of 500 years of history and also globally.

The Newseum - which will have its grand opening to the public on April 11 - features 14 main exhibition galleries exploring news history, electronic news, photojournalism, world news and how the media have covered major historical events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Even bloggers and the new "we media" trends get sufficient mention, including the Apple computer company's suit to silence a blogger, and bloggers' role in exposing the fraudulent documents at the heart of the false story on George W. Bush's National Guard service which 60 Minutes broadcast in the waning days of the 2004 presidential election campaign.

There are amazing artifacts - small things like a satchel and pencil in the possession of Associated Press correspondent Mark Kellogg when he was killed along with Gen. George Armstrong Custer and all of the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, and big things like a bullet-riddled armored pick-up truck used by Time to cover war in the former Yugoslavia, several sections of the Berlin Wall, and the twisted remains of the broadcast antenna from atop the second of the two World Trade Center towers to collapse on 9/11 - along with the camera of a photojournalist who died in the collapse.

You'll also see an 1860 issue of the Charleston (S.C.) Mercury with the headline "The Union Is Dissolved!" - one of some 30,000 historic newspapers in the museum collection (not all of them on display, of course). And you'll find more modern items like some of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's notes taken while reporting on the Watergate scandal, World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle's typewriter and faux news anchor/comedian Stephen Colbert's first script about "truthiness."

And yet, the Newseum is not like many museums, a collection of historical artifacts to be looked at for a few seconds before you shuffle on to the next display case. Instead, the artifacts are merely illustrations of the story of the news itself and the vital importance of the First Amendment in the history of America.

It's educational history with a modern sheen - and it's all presented in small, digestible bites. No one expects visitors to sit and watch a lengthy video presentation, instead the videos are edited in such a way that visitors will get the point of the presentation in a matter of a few handfuls of seconds. It's perfectly designed for today's media-over-saturated short-attention-span Americans. (And, yes, there is a certain depressing irony to the unavoidable use of video to help tell the story of newspapers.)

Video clips from old newsreels and today's news broadcasts - and pop-culture touchstones like Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update and Muppet Show skits featuring Kermit the Frog as a reporter, enliven the museum, as does a rather noticeable inclusion of pop music hits on audio tracks accompanying some of the exhibits and video presentations. It's multi-media, multi-sensory and interactive, but not overwhelming. And there are sections that force you to stop and contemplate the real cost of freedom and free speech.

Berlin Wall exhibit is one - the communist side of the wall is bare, but the freedom side of the wall is scrawled with graffiti. People died on the bare side for trying to get to the side where they could freely express themselves.

Another is a huge wall that features a map of the world with countries colored green, yellow or red, denoting the level of press freedom in each. Too little of the world is green, too much of it is red.

The most difficult display to contemplate is the alcove with the wall of glass panels reaching skyward and then curving slightly forward. Many of the glass panels are smooth, but too many are etched with the names of journalists who died in the line of duty.

It's a sobering display.

Nearby, a video monitor with a touch-screen interface lets visitors look up the names and histories of each name on the panel. It was on David Bloom's page when I arrived at the part of the tour.

The Newseum is located at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, and close to the big museums that ring the National Mall. It affords spectacular views of the DC skyline from Capitol sweeping across to the Washington Monument. Entrance will not be free, the way most museums in DC are free - that's because most museums here are funded generously by Congress with your tax dollars; the Newseum gets no tax money. But it's well worth the $20.

The design of the building is strikingly modern in a city where all the buildings are no more than about 10 stories tall, and a certain style of marbleized governmental architecture predominates. (If you're used to navigating a typical big city downtown in part by using its skyscrapers as landmarks and reference points, Washington will confuse you as it has only two tall buildings - the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument.)

The signature feature of the exterior - a 74-foot-high engraving of the First Amendment on Tennessee marble, seemingly big enough to be read from inside the Capitol. The Washington Post reviews the architecture here.

I've mentioned many of the things in the Newseum, and left out a myriad others. There is simply too much to try to recount here. I wasn't taking notes, just trying to take as much in as I could as Gene Policinski, vice president and executive director of the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center (which has operations in both Washington and at Vanderbilt University in Nashville), gave a guided tour to myself and a handful of bloggers including Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association, which worked with the Freedom Forum to organize the preview for bloggers. (Several top Newseum/Freedom Forum staffers guided various small groups through the tour, which appeared to be an excellent way to personalize the event for the fairly large group of, I'm guessing, 75 people.)

In separate displays both inside and outside, the Newseum displays printed copies of the front pages of nearly 200 daily newspapers from around the country, changing the displays every morning.

It's just one of the many exhibits within the Newseum that are constantly being re-edited and changed, to keep the Newseum's story of the news fresh and up-to-date. There's an old saying that goes, "You can't step into the same river twice," meaning that when you step in a second time, it is a changed river.

You can not visit the same Newseum twice, either.

But you most certainly should visit it at least once. And take your kids. They'll learn a lot about America, and why all Americans should be proud of their country, protective of the First Amendment and -yes - proud of their journalists even if they don't always accept modern journalism's claim of objectivity or accuracy. Journalism, with all its flaws, is still better than no journalism. And without the First Amendment, America would not be, well, America, nor would it be free.

Here are some photos I snapped along the way...

Daniel Glover, formerly blogger with National Journal and now senior producer at the Media Research Center's new video-blogging/social network site Eyeblast.tv, does a video interview of Mark Tapscott, blogger and Washington Examiner editorial page editor. Somewhere, Sean Hackbarth has a photo of me taking this picture.

The backdrop behind Tapscott? This:

U.S. Capitol Building

A section of the display showcasing the legal dispute between the Apple corporation and a blogger. Coincidentally, the story of that dispute is featured in the cover story on Apple.in the current edition of Wired magazine, which I read on the plane to Washington.

The wall of names of journalists killed in the line of duty.

Media Bloggers Association President Bob Cox - and, yes, that's Bob Cox in the lower photo on the Newseum wall in a section focused on blogging and the "we media" trend. And that's not MSNBC's Keith Olbermann in the picture the photo of Cox - it's a cell-phone snap of Saddam Hussein moments before he was hanged.

No, this isn't a stray shot from the nearby the Air & Space Museum. That's a news chopper suspended over the Newseum's nine-story atrium.

The view from the new studio at the Newseum being readied for ABC News' This Week With George Stephanopolous. What a great backdrop for a show about politics in the nation's capital. This Week will move into this studio in the near future. That's a reflection of me in the window, taking the pic. I also sat in Stephanopolous' spot, but I look goofy so you're not going to see the picture. The Newseum has multiple TV studios. This one's actually very small.