D.C.’s Newseum Is Closing Its Doors at the End of the Year
iting financial difficulties, the Newseum, a museum dedicated to the history of journalism, First Amendment freedoms and the free press, will close its doors at the end of the year.
In a statement, the Washington, D.C., institution revealed that it has struggled financially for several years and can no longer sustain operations at its current location. Last January, the museum’s founder and primary funder, the Freedom Forum, agreed to sell the building to Johns Hopkins University for $373 million. The university will use the Pennsylvania Avenue building for its D.C.-based graduate programs.
Sonya Gavankar, director of public relations for the Newseum, tells Smithsonian.com that all of the artifacts and exhibits will remain in place until the end of 2019, when the building closes to the public. At that time, any artifacts on loan from other institutions will be returned to their owners. Everything in the permanent collection will be moved to an archive facility outside Washington until a location is determined for public display.
The museum has hosted dozens of temporary exhibitions on themes including the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, presidential photographers, the Lincoln assassination, the Vietnam War, as well as various exhibitions on editorial cartoonists and exceptional journalists.
The museum also maintains a permanent 9/11 Gallery, which explores the terrorist attacks and includes first-person accounts from journalists who witnessed the event and artifacts including pieces of the World Trade Center and a piece of the plane that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Its Berlin Wall Gallery is also a significant draw; the space includes eight intact sections of the 12-foot high concrete barricade, the largest unaltered section of wall outside Germany, as well as a three-story guard tower that stood near Checkpoint Charlie.
Over the course of more than 11 years, the Newseum drew some 10 million visitors. But, as Sophia Barnes at Washington’s NBC4 reports, the museum struggled to afford the 400,000-foot venue. The museum charges $24.95 for adult visitors, but with many free options just a few blocks away, the Newseum had difficulty competing.
Speaking with NBC4, Gavankar says that the Newseum hopes to reopen in another, more sustainable, place. “We hope to find a suitable location that can serve as the Newseum’s next home but that process will take time,” she says.
Gavankar adds that the Newseum’s traveling exhibits, including deep dives into rock ‘n’ roll, JFK, the Stonewall Riots, and photojournalism, will continue on at museums around the country.
The closing of the museum is no surprise to those familiar with the Newseum’s financial situation. Peggy McGlone and Manuel Roig-Franzia at the Washington Post report that the Newseum has operated at a deficit every year since opening at its current site. “It’s a slow-motion disaster,” one person with knowledge of the museum’s inner workings told the Post.
Initially founded in 1997 in the D.C. suburb of Rosslyn, the Newseum readied to move into Washington, D.C., proper in 2000. Buoyed by early success, it bought its current site along the Potomac River across from the National Art Gallery for about $146 million (adjusted for inflation).
As Kriston Capps at CityLab reports, the opulent space, which opened to the public in 2008, was the baby of late USA Today and Gannett founder Allen Neuharth, who created the Freedom Forum back in 1991.https://www.rakennerahastot.fi/web/p6nvgxq0r/home/-/blogs/get-services-of-istikhara-for-online-marriage-in-pakistan-by-molvi?
Construction cost $450 million, twice initial estimates. Burdened with $300 million in debt, the institution struggled to stay afloat from the get-go. Critics point out that despite financial woes, the institution still paid its director a $630,000 salary; other executives and board members were also paid at rates above the norm for a cultural nonprofit.
“This was a museum that purchased a multi-million-dollar building in a location where, when you look around, there are lots of free museums to go to,” Joanna Woronkowicz of Indiana University tells Capps. “While the mission of the organization is unique, in that sense, it’s not unique in what it provides to people who want to go to museums in D.C.”
Like journalism itself, the Newseum will likely survive in some form despite its financial setbacks, but, as Capps surmises, it probably won’t have all the bells and whistles as it had in its present incarnationesterday, hundreds of thousands of travelers around the globe found out that they were potentially stranded when Thomas Cook, one of the largest and oldest travel agencies and charter airlines in the world abruptly announced it was bankrupt. The firm immediately began liquidating assets and laid off its 22,000 employees. The event has put the British government on the hook for bringing 150,000 of its citizens home, the largest repatriation effort by the country since World War II.
Patrick Collinson at the Guardian reports that the 178-year-old travel company has experienced financial troubles for the past decade after merging with another travel group called MyTravel. Cook absorbed that company’s substantial debts while at the same time contending with increasingly competitive online travel hubs. That, plus a decline in bookings following Brexit uncertainty, all led up to the situation on Monday. When the company was denied a $250 million loan from private investors to stay afloat, it led to the immediate dissolution of the company.
Ben Perry at AFP reports that the bankruptcy has forced the government to step in. In a project dubbed Operation Matterhorn, the U.K. government and Civil Aviation Authority are lining up private flights to bring people home. “All customers currently abroad with Thomas Cook who are booked to return to the UK over the next two weeks will be brought home as close as possible to their booked return date,” the government wrote in a statement. It's not clear what, if any, type of arrangements are being made for non-U.K. travelers.
Any future travel plans arranged through Thomas Cook are canceled and customers will be refunded, mainly through government-back insurance, as Ceylan Yeginsu and Michael Wolgelenter at The New York Times report. The insurance will also reimburse hotels for customer stays, but some resorts don’t appear to have been made aware of that. Nightmare scenarios from people currently on vacation are slowly coming to light. Ian Westbrook at the BBC reports that all guests booked through Thomas Cook in one hotel in Spain had been locked out of their rooms and forced to pay out of pocket if they wanted to get back in. Several couples of elderly people were reported sleeping on couches in the hotel lobby. Molly Olmstead at Slate reports that up to 50,000 people are currently stuck on various Greek islands.
The New York Times reports that the shuttering of the company could have major impacts on certain destinations that rely heavily on Cook’s travel packages. The island of Crete, for example, receives 400,000 visitors booked by Cook annually. The Canary Islands receives about 3.2 to 3.6 million visitors via Cook charter flights each year.
Thomas Cook was started back in 1841 by cabinet maker Thomas Cook of Leicestershire, a supporter of the temperance movement. At that time, he arranged for a special train to carry supporters 12 miles to a temperance rally. As CNN reports, Cook continued to organize trips to temperance events and Sunday schools until 1845 when he organized his first commercial trip to Liverpool, complete with a travel guide for the event.
From there, things snowballed, and a decade later Cook was organizing trips to visit continental Europe, the United States and Egypt. In 1872, the company, continued by Cook's son, even put together the first round-the-world tour. Over time, it became the largest tour operator in Britain. It was considered so important that, after World War II almost bankrupted it, the tour agency was nationalized from 1948 to 1972.
When the company asked the government for a bailout this time around, the Boris Johnson administration said no. The New York Times reports that U.K. transportation secretary Grant Shapps pointed out that the company was billions of dollars in debt, and that a short-term bailout would not have saved it in the long run.
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