page_title: Newseum
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Newseum / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Intersection of Wilson Blvd. and North Lynn Street in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. The former Newseum building (with the dome) is visible in the background.
context_page_description: The Newseum was an interactive museum that promoted free expression and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, while tracing the evolution of communication. The seven-level, 250,000-square-foot museum was located in Washington, D.C., and featured fifteen theaters and fifteen galleries. Its Berlin Wall Gallery included the largest display of sections of the wall outside Germany. The Today's Front Pages Gallery presented daily front pages from more than 80 international newspapers. The Today's Front Pages Gallery is still available on the Newseum's website, along with a few other galleries.
  Other galleries presented topics including the First Amendment, world press freedom, news history, the September 11 attacks, and the history of the Internet, TV, and radio.
  It opened at its first location in Rosslyn, Virginia, on April 18, 1997, and on April 11, 2008, it opened at its last location. As of December 31, 2019, the Newseum closed its doors and is seeking a new site, while many exhibits and artifacts went into storage or were returned to their owners.
  The Newseum attracted more than 815,000 visitors a year, and its television studios hosted news broadcasts.
context_section_description: Freedom Forum is a non-profit organization founded in 1991 by Al Neuharth, based on the previous Gannett Foundation.  Freedom Forum opened the Newseum in Arlington, Virginia, in 1997. Prior to opening in Virginia, it maintained exhibition galleries in Nashville and Manhattan, the latter in the lobby of the former IBM Building at 590 Madison Avenue. In 2000, Freedom Forum decided to move the museum across the Potomac River to downtown Washington, D.C. The original site was closed on March 3, 2002, to allow its staff to concentrate on building the new, larger museum. The new museum, built at a cost of $450 million, opened its doors to the public on April 11, 2008.
  Tim Russert, a Newseum trustee, said, "The Newseum made a pretty good impression in Arlington, but at your new location on Pennsylvania Avenue, you will make an indelible mark."
  The Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue shares a block adjacent to the Canadian Embassy.
  After obtaining a landmark location at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street NW, the former site of National Hotel, the Newseum board selected noted exhibit designer Ralph Appelbaum, who had designed the original site in Arlington, Virginia, and architect James Stewart Polshek, who designed the Rose Center for Earth and Space with Todd Schliemann at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, to work on the new project.
  This design team had the following goals:
  To design a building that would be an architectural icon, easily recognized and remembered by visitors from around the world;
  To create a museum space three times as large as the original, with the capacity for more than two million visitors a year; and
  To celebrate the First Amendment to the United States Constitution – in particular, its freedom of the press and freedom of speech protections.
  Highlights of the building design unveiled October 2002 include a façade featuring a "window on the world", 57 ft × 78 ft (17 m × 24 m), which looks out on Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall while letting the public see inside to the visitors and displays. It features the 45 words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, etched into a four story tall stone panel facing Pennsylvania Avenue.
  One feature carried over from the prior Arlington site was the Journalists Memorial, a glass sculpture listing the names of 2,291 journalists from around the world killed in the line of duty. It is updated and rededicated annually.
  The museum website is updated daily with images and PDF versions of newspaper front pages from around the world. Images are replaced daily, but an archive of front pages from notable events since 2001 is also available. Hard copies of selected front pages, including one from every U.S. state and Washington, D.C., are displayed in galleries within the museum and outside the front entrance.
  Jerry Frieheim, a 1956 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, was the first executive director of the Newseum and claims to have coined the name.
caption: The original Newseum in Arlington, now home to an art gallery and theater.
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