The Newseum is Old News

I went to an event in Washington D.C. last week and had a lunch at the brand new Newseum, right off the Mall at Pennsylvania Avenue and C Street. While I didn’t have time to see the whole thing, the building is certainly spiffy and has some cool exhibits – including one place where they’ll video you as an anchorman, a First Amendment center and a memorial to journalists killed in the line of duty.

As new as it is, the Newseum also epitomizes much of what is wrong with the mainstream media today. News and journalism is a dynamic medium where citizens now have not only a plethora of choices to get their information, but today’s technology can let everyone be at least an armchair journalist. By the time you get the news it's already happened, and if you get it from a newspaper it's really old. Mainstream media outlets and daily papers are in serious financial trouble, but you'd never know that after looking at the Newseum.

It’s also no secret that many people get information from blogs like this one, download free images from Flickr instead of paying for them at Getty Images, and more people get their everyday news from Web sites like CNN.com and Fox News online instead of their broadcast counterparts. Yet the Newseum only has a small section devoted to the Internet, and I didn’t see anything focused on blogs or other forms of citizen journalism.

Much of the Newseum is focused to yesterday’s older, static images – newspapers, magazines, TV and books. It is fitting that the Newseum has these because that is where much of this belongs – in a museum. When the Washington Post Company gets more income from its Kaplan Testing division than its newspapers, you know the tide is irreversible. I think it’s a mistake to have the bulk of the Newseum’s exhibits centered on the way we used to get the news yesterday. It is the old media’s reluctance to change that is dooming the mainstream media, along with its focus on the superficial and sensational.

Outside the Newseum are print front pages from across the country. While this is interesting, especially for visitors to Washington, it’s not enough of a draw to lure people in – especially with so many other museums around the corner. In fact, the Newseum is not part of the Smithsonian and charges $20 for adults and $13 for kids to get in. Will the family of four visiting from Kansas pay $56 to go here, or nothing to go to the Air & Space Museum three blocks away? For me, the Newseum’s charging for access is similar to the question of why anyone would pay for a daily paper when there are so many ways to get the same information for free. It’s a changing world that the media just doesn’t seem to get, even when it’s building a monument to celebrate its achievements.

More Info:
Why Journalists Hate Journalism

One of My Earlier Media Rants, And Another