Al Neuharth, the publisher who founded USA Today, established the Freedom Forum as a non-profit in 1991 to advance journalism, free speech, and free thought. The forum opened the original Newseum in Rosslyn, Virginia, on April 18, 1997. The Rosslyn facility was modest by museum standards - 72,000 square feet across seven levels in an existing office building. It drew respectable crowds and proved the concept worked. In 2000, Freedom Forum decided to move the Newseum across the Potomac to a much grander location on Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the Capitol and the White House. The original Rosslyn site closed on March 3, 2002 to allow staff to focus entirely on the new building. Construction took six years and ran $450 million. The new Newseum opened to the public on April 11, 2008.

Architect James Stewart Polshek, whose firm had designed the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, drew the new building. Exhibit designer Ralph Appelbaum, who had designed the original Newseum and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, designed the interior. The complete building totaled 643,000 square feet across seven levels - 250,000 of which were museum space. Fifteen theaters. A dozen major galleries. Two broadcast studios. The world's largest hydraulic passenger elevators - 18,000-pound capacity, room for 72 people per car, traveling 100 feet through seven floors. The building also included 145,500 square feet of housing facing Sixth and C Streets - 135 luxury apartments above the museum - and 75,000 square feet of office space for the Freedom Forum. A Wolfgang Puck restaurant, The Source, occupied the ground floor. The First Amendment text on the facade was carved into stone 75 feet tall.

Inside, the permanent exhibits drew on the messy artifacts of reporting itself. The Journalists Memorial displayed the laptop computer Daniel Pearl had been using when he was kidnapped and murdered by Al-Qaeda in Pakistan in 2002. The bloodstained notebook of Michael Weisskopf - the Time correspondent who had lost his hand throwing back an Iraqi insurgent's grenade in 2003 - sat in a case. The 1976 Datsun 710 sedan belonging to Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles, who had been killed by a car bomb in Phoenix that June while investigating organized crime, sat in another. The News History Gallery held a 1603 English broadsheet announcing the coronation of James I, a 1787 Maryland Gazette containing the new United States Constitution, an 1860 Charleston Mercury declaring The Union Is Dissolved!, and a 1948 Chicago Daily Tribune wrongly proclaiming Dewey Defeats Truman. The 9/11 Gallery held a portion of the World Trade Center's communications antenna recovered from the rubble.

The Newseum was a hit with visitors - 1.7 million in its first four years - but it was a financial disaster. The museum charged steep admission fees in a city famous for free Smithsonian museums. Ticket sales in 2011 covered just 10 percent of operating expenses. In 2015, the museum lost more than $2.5 million on revenue of $59 million. The construction had run far over budget. The continuing operating losses exceeded $20 million a year, funded by the Freedom Forum from its endowment. In August 2017, Newseum president Jeffrey Herbst resigned. In February 2018, The Washington Post reported the museum was exploring the sale of its building or a move to a smaller facility. In January 2019, the Freedom Forum announced the sale: Johns Hopkins University would purchase the building for $372.5 million for use by its Carey Business School and several other graduate programs. The Newseum closed permanently on December 31, 2019.

When Johns Hopkins presented its renovation designs in July 2019, the plans included removing the 75-foot First Amendment panel from the facade. The panel was successfully dismantled. In March 2021, the Freedom Forum announced it would donate the stone to the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. The 50-ton marble tablet was installed there by January 2022, spanning a 100-foot-wide wall on the center's Grand Hall Overlook, a second-floor atrium overlooking Independence Hall. The Berlin Wall sections returned to various owners or museums. The Don Bolles Datsun and the Daniel Pearl laptop were returned to families and partner organizations. The Pulitzer Prize Photographs collection went into storage. The closure of the Journalists Memorial in particular concerned press freedom advocates - there was no other public memorial in the United States honoring journalists killed in the line of duty. In December 2020, a bipartisan group in Congress passed legislation authorizing construction of a Fallen Journalists Memorial on public land with private funding. The Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation began design work in May 2023. The building at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue is now Johns Hopkins property. The First Amendment is moving to Philadelphia. The museum that tried to tell the story of journalism could not, finally, find a way to pay for telling it.