Media7 Blog 2 - 9 April
Wednesday 9 April
The news media business is in crisis. Great names teeter on the digital precipice & So what do you do? Drop nearly half a billion dollars on a Te Papa for typewriters: a shimmering seven-story monument to the scruffy profession of journalism.
The Freedom Forum's Newseum - a museum for the news - finally opens in Washington this week, replacing a much smaller facility on the far side of the Potomac River. The $450 million building boasts a 50-ton marble engraving of The First Amendment looms over its front door. Inside, there's a giant TV and more than 6000 exhibit items. USA Today, whose publisher, the Gannett Company, was once headed by Forum founder Bob Neuarth, has an interactive guide to the museum, and its progress has been shown off with regular video bulletins on YouTube.
The project has long had a home in cyberspace - including a popular feature that displays front pages from 587 front pages in 59 countries. More recently, it has added Newsmania, a news trivia game. The new building is being described as "the world's most interactive museum". But not everyone's happy. Slate's Jack Schafer had this to say:
Avoid the gilded disaster that is the Newseum. Avoid paying the $20 they charge for admission. I want the Freedom Forum to sell off their monument valley installation and use the proceeds to actually support journalism. Like endowing a newspaper, for instance.
And - how piquant - a former business reporter for Gannett is using his blog to demand answers over the $425,000 Neuarth got from the non-profit Forum in 2006 - that's 280 times the average sum it awards to needy journalism students: We thought David Farrier's April first item for Nightline on "jenkem", a new drug made from human waste, was one of the better hoaxes we've seen.
But perhaps because Farrier came back after the break to explain that although the Fox News footage he used was real, the drug scourge isn't, there was no bite from the moral guardians - even after some enterprising viewers set up a Jenkem Appreciation Page on Bebo.
And finally, British media have been queuing up to pay tribute to Sir Geoffrey Cox, the New Zealander who revolutionised Independent Television News.
After his death at the age of 97, former Times editor Sir William Rees-Mogg described him as "one of the leading people who created modern British television news. Any news programme in modern Britain comes from a culture which he helped to create." The Daily Telegraph led its obit with Sir Robin Day's characterisation of Cox as "the best television journalist we have ever known in Britain."
