How Many Of Those Newseum Reviewers Who Gushed How Great The New News Museum in DC Is Would Have Actually Paid $20 a Head From Their Own Pocket For The Press Tour And Later Returned To Pay For The Whole Family?

Philip Stone April 11, 2008

By all accounts the news industry has a great living monument to be proud of in Washington, DC – a fabulous state-of-the art interactive $450 Million museum dedicated to news that opens today. Too bad so many people won’t get to see it because of the $20 entrance fee!.

Yet again another example of the news business shooting itself in the foot!

As readers of this site may recall this writer has been dealing with the problem of trying to convince his 30-something son who has not read a newspaper in years for all the reasons that have been well documented on why the young don’t read newspapers; he figures he’s giving Dad a break by watching a few minutes of news on television!

So when Son told Dad he was planning a trip to the nation’s capital Dad immediately messaged that he and his buddies should be sure to take in the new news museum that has received such rave reviews. Speedily back came the three-letter response: “lol” (lots of luck) which in turn really means something else that is not printable on a family-read Internet service. As things got heated he got right down to it, “When are you going to get it through your head that I’m not going to pay **** to buy news any more, and that especially includes going to a news museum!”

So the very people that museum should be aiming at to get them mesmerized once again by the great traditions of the news business are going to fall by the wayside – they won’t pay money to obtain news and they certainly won’t pay good money to go to a museum that puts news in the brightest light using all of the interactive wizardry that could be mustered to entice the young.

This item is being written in far away Switzerland so maybe we can see the forest from the trees that those inside the Beltline don’t see – for charging a $20 entrance fee sounds from here pure stupidity.

Sure, it’s accepted that the place cost a bomb to build, $450 million, and no doubt extremely expensive to run day-to-day. It’s a fabulous looking ultramodern glass palace located on prime land on Pennsylvania Avenue  that is a credit to all of us who have made news our lives’ work. It probably only got done, at such great expanse, because of the tenacity of  USA Today newspaper founder Al Neuharth's Freedom Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to free speech, free press and free spirit.  Neuharth, one may recall, once ran Gannett and in his day was considered one of the most powerful and most feared media executives in the US – such was the power of newspapers in those days.

And while there is mostly praise for the building itself and what it does there was this item on the Baltimore Sun website headlined, “News Biz Crashes, Newseum Soars” which stated, “Considering the grave ailments afflicting journalism, especially newspapers, the sheer scale, splendor and cost of the Newseum …might leave some observers wondering if it's offering the modern equivalent of a wonderful concert on the deck of the Titanic.”

And Jack Shafer, media critic for the Washington Post-owned Slate online magazine, in a story headlined, “Down With Newseum” called the building a “gilded disaster”. He said the $450 million would have gone better to endow a newspaper.

Well, we won’t go there, but the word “endowment” is the operative word for the news industry. Having coughed up the funds to build the place, and donating  artifacts, people and the like to make the show what it is, the industry now has to take that added step and independently assure the financial strength of the museum going forward so there is no need for an entrance fee. Surely the museum doesn’t want just rich folks visiting?

There can be no doubt the upkeep must be enormous given the scale of everything that goes on inside that building, but what’s the point of building something so magnificent that you make it prohibitive for the public at large to see what you’ve done? This is not a Disneyland or Universal Studios attraction in California or Florida, this is a museum dedicated to a craft that is frankly going through a tough time right now and the goal, frankly, should be to present the message for how the media has played such an important role in our lives in the pat and indeed continues to do so today, and attracting the most eyes physically on that message the better.

We don’t need to go into the financial difficulties hitting media companies but let us not forget that the media as a whole is a very profitable business. Even US newspapers that get slammed the most are really not doing that badly – instead of average 30% margins there are average 17% margins. Media organizations and foundations contributed to the building fund; now they must take a role in getting that entrance fee eliminated.

If there are any obstacles because of the Neuharth or Gannett connection then those need to be put aside. Having donated to build the place it’s now time to step up with the annual cash necessary to make the building accessible to everyone for free. The Washington Post has at least got into the right spirit by sponsoring for the first year schoolchildren in Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC, and hopefully that will turn into a tradition.

And this is not about whether art museums and the like charge hefty prices these days for entrance. This is a museum among many museums in the nation’s capital, most of which do not charge an entrance fee. Not only that, it is in the news industry’s own best interests that as many of those families that visit the nation’s capital add the Newseum to their list of places to see; let’s get them heavily immersed in how important news is to them, not only from the past but in today’s world, too.

The last thing one wants is for the Newseum to be rthought of as a newspaper  morgue – rather newspaper, and all other media  should be seen as an integral part of everyday life and to get that message across to the largest possible audience will be money very well spent by the media business.