A BROKEN BEACON
Crushed by debt, the Newseum couldn’t live up to lofty ambitions
Abald eagle shot into the sky on the day in April 2008 that the Newseum celebrated the unveiling of its sumptuous building with the soaring facade just steps from the U.S. Capitol.
A Marine band played before an A-list audience that included the chief justice of the Supreme Court and titans of the newspaper industry.
Al Neuharth, the USA Today founder whose grand vision was reaching fruition, gushed about the “glamorous glass house” that had sprouted on land bought at the highest price ever for a chunk of real estate in the city’s history.
The new museum’s chief executive, Charles Overby, declared that they were “laying down a marker right here on Pennsylvania Avenue that the First Amendment is the cornerstone of our democracy.”
The dazzling beginning, though, belied the dizzying
fall that was to come.
“Everyone was so mesmerized,” said Edward Alwood, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. “We thought, ... ‘This thing can’t lose.’”
Ten years later, the Newseum is facing an uncertain future, the distress sale of its building to Johns Hopkins University marking the end of a troubled tenure that serves as a cautionary tale of bloated budgets and unrealized ambition.
The failure of the venue, weighted down by debt and beset by management upheaval, is a gut punch to an industry labeled the “enemy of the people” by President Donald Trump.
During the next 11 months — before it closes to the public in January 2020 — the Newseum will welcome visitors into its light-splashed atrium on their way to see artifacts as heartbreaking as a charred remnant of the New York tower that terrorists toppled on Sept. 11 and as inspiring as its popular gallery of Pulitzer-winning photographs.
Even as visitors pass those sights, planning will be underway to scatter the collection into a storage facility and, in some cases, to return items to donors.
“We plan to continue the Newseum’s crucial work of increasing public understanding of the importance of a free press and the First Amendment for decades to come — through digital outreach, traveling exhibits, and web-based programs in schools around the world, as well as hopefully in a new physical home in the area,” Maeve Gaynor Scott, the Newseum’s director of collections, said in a recent email to individuals and institutions that have lent pieces to the museum.
Neuharth’s daughter, Jan Neuharth — who heads the Freedom Forum, the museum’s primary benefactor — has said that a new location in the city will be found after the $372.5 million sale to Hopkins.
But in an interview with The Washington Post last year, Nueharth mused aloud about myriad possibilities, including a home in some digital “cloud.”
“The short answer,” she said then, “is we don’t know what it will look like.”
The Newseum originally opened in 1997 in an “Today’s Front Pages,” from newspapers worldwide office building over a Metro subway stop in Rosslyn, Virginia. About 400,000 visitors a year enjoyed free entry to its interactive exhibitions, innovative video displays and a memorial to fallen journalists. Positive reviews and enthusiastic crowds prompted Al Neuharth to dream bigger, and, in the coming years, he imagined a splashier space across the Potomac River.
The Freedom Forum had a reputation for excess, so it wasn’t a shock that it plunked down $100 million for a parcel on Pennsylvania Avenue with a prime view of the Capitol.
To pull off the real-estate deal, the foundation had to make a choice: Pay for the building in Washington or maintain its network of overseas offices, which supported democratic ideals.
“We chose Washington,” Overby, who hasn’t responded to interview requests, told the American Journalism Review in 2001.
Eliminating the overseas offices wasn’t enough. The next year, the foundation axed its Freedom Forum Fellows program, which helped working journalists get academic credentials to teach at universities. It also shuttered its old location in Rossyln.
With its plans fixed on swanky new digs in Washington, the foundation also needed piles of cash. It took out $350 million in loans to pay for construction.
Marrying vision and execution proved problematic. Costs soared. Delays mounted. By the time the Newseum was ready to open, the project was three years behind schedule; its price tag would eventually swell to $477 million.
Still, museum leaders remained confident. They looked at the millions who visited the Smithsonian’s Air and Space and Natural History museums and figured they could reasonably expect to draw 1 million a year. High-tech exhibits, a conference space and a Wolfgang Puck restaurant would help.
But there was a difference between their museum and the popular, admission-free Smithsonians: They would charge an entrance fee — one of the highest in city. It now stands at $25 a person.
The Newseum leaders never met their goal. In 2017, its best attendance year, the venue drew 855,000 visitors.
And the money wasn’t coming in, either. From 2008 to 2017, admission revenue never surpassed $10 million, meaning the average ticket was discounted to less than $10.
Meanwhile, the museum cut expenses: In the past 10 years, it has had five rounds of staff cuts. And, while operating in the red, it kept paying big salaries to upper management, including $1.2 million to chief executive James C. Duff in 2014.
Critics groused about exhibits focusing on pop culture, including more recent ones on rock music and presidential dogs, rather than issues such as the changing media and consumer habits.
Instead of using its authority to push back on Trump’s claims that journalists are enemies of the people and that the media traffics in “fake news,” the Newseum shop sold “fake news” T-shirts. It pulled the shirts in the summer, after a firestorm of criticism.
Still, there was something that visitors found endearing about the place.
Erika Pribanic-smith, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, wants the Newseum to expand its digital content to better serve a society gripped by partisan bickering and suspicious of media bias.
“We need journalism education now more than ever,” she said, noting that she frequently uses the Newseum’s digital archives and “Today’s Front Pages,”
“I think the building was a wonderful beacon, a wonderful monument to journalism. But the more they can do with their digital space, to get the word out there, that’s so much more accessible.”