Newseum

The Newseum is an interactive museum of news and journalism located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C. The seven-level, 250,000 square foot museum features 15 theaters and 14 galleries. The Newseum's Berlin Wall Gallery includes the largest display of sections of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany. The Today's Front Pages Gallery presents daily front pages from more than 80 international newspapers. Other galleries present topics including news history, the September 11 attacks, the First Amendment, world press freedom and the history of the Internet, TV and radio. It opened at its first location in Rosslyn, Virginia, on April 18, 1997, where it admitted visitors without charge. Its stated mission is "to help the public and the news media understand one another better" and to "raise public awareness of the important role of a free press in a democratic society". In five years, the original Newseum attracted more than 2.25 million visitors. The Newseum's operations are funded by the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation dedicated to "free press, free speech and free spirit for all people". The new Newseum, which does charge an admission fee, has become one of Washington's most popular new destinations, and its high definition television studios regularly host news broadcasts including ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

History

In 2000, Freedom Forum decided to move the Newseum from its location in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. The original Newseum was closed on March 3, 2002, in order to allow its staff to concentrate on building the new, larger museum. The new museum, built at a cost of $450 million, opened its doors to the public on April 11, 2008.

Tim Russert, a Newseum trustee, said, "The Newseum made a pretty good impression in Arlington, but at your new location on Pennsylvania Avenue, you will make an indelible mark."

After obtaining a landmark location at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street NW, the Newseum board selected noted exhibit designer Ralph Appelbaum, who had designed the original Newseum in Arlington, Virginia, and architect James Stewart Polshek, who designed the Rose Center for Earth and Space with Todd Schliemann at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, to work on the new project.

This design team had the following goals:

• To design a building that would be an architectural icon, easily recognized and remembered by visitors from around the world;
• To create a museum space three times as large as the original, with the capacity for more than two million visitors a year; and
• To celebrate the First Amendment to the United States Constitution — in particular, its freedom of the press and free speech protections.

Highlights of the building design unveiled October 2002 include a façade featuring a "window on the world", 57 ft × 78 ft (17 m × 24 m), which looks out on Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall while letting the public see inside to the visitors and displays. It also features the 45 words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, etched into a stone panel facing Pennsylvania Avenue.

One feature carried over from the prior Arlington site was the Journalists Memorial, an elegant glass sculpture which lists the names of 1,900 journalists from around the world who were killed in the line of duty. It is still updated and rededicated every year.

The museum currently maintains a website, which is updated daily with images and PDF versions of newspaper front pages from around the world. Images are replaced daily, but an archive of front pages from notable events since 2001 is also available. Hard copies of the front pages are featured in a gallery within the actual museum. Unlike its original museum in Arlington, the new Newseum charges admission fees to the general public.

Jerry Frieheim, a 1956 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, was the first executive director of the Newseum and claims to have coined the name.

Building

The 643,000-square-foot (60,000 m²) Newseum includes a 90-foot- (27 m) high atrium, seven levels of displays, 15 theaters, a dozen major galleries, many more smaller exhibits, two broadcast studios, and an expanded interactive newsroom.

The building also features an oval, 500-seat "Forum" theater; approximately 145,500 square feet (14,000 m²) gross of housing facing Sixth and C streets; 75,000 square feet (7,000 m²) of office space for the staff of the Newseum and Freedom Forum; and more than 11,000 square feet (1,000 m²) of conference center space on two levels located directly above the Newseum Atrium. The building also features glass hydraulic elevators that are the tallest in the world. A further feature of the Newseum building is a curving glass memorial to slain journalists located on the ground floor.

Showcase environments throughout the museum are climate controlled by four centrally located active microclimate control devices. These units provide a constant flow of humidified air to the cases through a system of distribution pipes.

This Week with George Stephanopoulos made its inaugural broadcast from its new studio in the Newseum on April 20, 2008.

Critical response

Thomas Frank criticized the Newseum's original location in his 2000 book One Market Under God:

Maybe Arlington is where journalism has come to die, in a place as distant as could be found from the urban maelstrom and the rural anger that once nourished it, within easy reach of the caves of state, sunk deep in the pockets of corporate power, here where busloads of glassy-eyed, well-dressed high schoolers from the affluent suburbs of Virginia can play anchorman on its grave.

The New York Times' Architecture Review panned the second Newseum building as "the latest reason to lament the state of contemporary architecture in" Washington, D.C. Of the Newseum's actual content, the Times stated that "a good portion of the museum’s earnestly sought attention is well deserved", but "the museum’s preening does call for some skepticism". USA Today repeated "mixed" reviews of the building's architecture and cited the number of visitors as a sign that the Newseum is a "success as a destination in the museum-rich national capital".

References

Further reading

External links

• Newseum
• "Today's Front Pages" (Newseum)
• "Newseum Grand Opening"
• "Newseum by Polshek", William Lebovich, ArchitectureWeek No. 395, 2008.0903, pD1-1.
• "Worth the Price of Admission?", Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post Weekend, May 23, 2008 p22-23
• "Top 10 Kid Faves at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.", Sandra Foyt, On Living By Learning, April 15, 2009
• TravelSkoot video of the Newseum

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Categories: Buildings | Buildings in USA | Buildings in District of Columbia, USA | Buildings in Washington, District of Columbia, USA