The Forum Club Investigates the Newseum

Jessica Adkins, assistant editor

In the midst of peak cherry blossom season, Washington, D.C., was a bustling city full of tourists. Among the groups of people was PVCC’s The Forum Club.  On Saturday April 6, The Forum Club left bright and early to start their journey to Washington to visit the Newseum.

The Newseum is a museum located on the corner of C Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., offering guests to experience what it is like to be in the journalism field. With six levels of exhibits, there was a lot to do and explore.

The lowest level consists of the cafe, the Berlin Wall exhibit, and the FBI exhibit. In the Berlin Wall exhibit, there is an area where a person can actually touch a piece of the wall. In the middle of the Berlin exhibit stands one of the watchtowers from the war named Checkpoint Charlie.

The FBI exhibit shows some of America’s most publicized crimes. When enter the exhibit, one might notice the Nissan Pathfinder that was used in the 2010 Times Square car bombing.  Further into the FBI exhibit sat the Unabomber’s cabin. There was an eerie feeling coming from the small wooden structure that once stood alone in the middle of the tree-filled wilderness. The Pulitzer Prize photography exhibit is on level one of the museum, along with two gift shops. Among the prize-winning pictures was a picture from the tragic events that took place in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017. While standing and looking at the pictures, it was hard not to cry.

The ethics center and the interactive newsroom are on level two. In the ethics center, visitors can use interactive kiosks to answer what they would do in a tough journalism setting. If a group of people wanted to try test their ethics, there was an interactive game that people could compete against each other.

In the interactive newsroom, visitors can stand in front of a camera and teleprompter, read a selected script into a microphone, and be recorded. A few cubicles down from the fast-paced recording studio were news desks that people could sit at and have their picture taken as if they were about to go on air.

Level three includes the journalism memorial which featured all names of journalists who have been killed in the line of work. One of the other exhibits was the Bloomberg Internet, TV, and Radio Gallery. This exhibit shows the evolution of internet, TV, and radio broadcasting.

Level four consisted of the 9/11 journalism exhibit which had an entire wall full of headlines from 9/11 and the days that followed. In a little room located in the corner of the exhibit, people could sit and watch a short documentary about the events of 9/11. Down the corridor from the 9/11 exhibit was the civil rights exhibit.

“I enjoyed seeing all the different headlines about the same events that happened on 9/11,” said Forum Club member Deadra Miller.

On level five, there was an entire exhibit dedicated to sharing historical newspaper front pages. These dated back to the 1400s. Behind the exhibit was the Newseum’s 100-foot-wide video screen that showed a video about LGBTQ+ and civil rights which correlated with the LGBTQ+ exhibit that was one floor above. Sitting outside of the historic newsroom was a replica of the Gutenberg Press.

On the top floor was the Greenspun terrace where they were actually filming a news segment that featured the U.S. Capitol building in the background. When a person came in from the terrace, they were greeted front pages from newspapers around the U.S. and the world. The LGBTQ+ exhibit that showed how the LGBTQ+ civil rights evolved over the years was also located on the top floor.

Miller said, “It was a great experience, and I would love to go back again. I learned a lot about different types of journalism but had fun while doing it.”