Qualla: Newseum

Newseum: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0. Inside the front lobby of the Newseum, suspended in the 90-foot atrium, hung a Bell helicopter that had once belonged to KXAS-TV in Dallas. Around the atrium walls ran the day's front pages from more than 80 international newspapers, updated every morning. Outside, on the Pennsylvania Avenue facade, the entire text of the First Amendment was carved in a stone panel 75 feet tall. Inside, the Berlin Wall Gallery held eight 12-foot concrete sections of the wall - three tons each, the largest display of authentic Berlin Wall outside Germany - and a three-story East German guard tower from Checkpoint Charlie. The Journalists Memorial inscribed more than 1,800 names of reporters killed in the line of duty. The Pulitzer Photo Gallery displayed every Pulitzer-winning photograph since 1942. For twelve years - April 2008 to December 2019 - the Newseum was one of Washington's most ambitious museums, and one of its most expensive failures.

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Image: AgnosticPreachersKid | CC BY-SA 3.0

Newseum: Neuharth's Idea

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mack Male from Edmonton, AB, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 s...

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Image: Mack Male from Edmonton, AB, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Newseum: 643,000 Square Feet

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mathieu Landretti, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 Museu...

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Image: Mathieu Landretti | CC BY-SA 4.0

Newseum: Don Bolles's Datsun

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Queerbubbles, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 - ...

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Image: Queerbubbles | CC BY-SA 3.0

Newseum: Twenty Million a Year

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Exchanges Photos, CC0. 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 mus...

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Image: Exchanges Photos | CC0

Newseum: What the Building Kept and Lost

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 Constitutio...

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