So the $450 million, 7-story Newseum building in Washington, D.C. erected by the Freedom Forum in 2008, is now being sold to Johns Hopkins University for $372.5 million to help pay the FF’s mounting debt.
The point is what were the “freedom” founders thinking when they built a physical structure for what had by 2008 become mostly a digital media? Why would anyone pay a $25 admission fee to see what they could easily view on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which provides free access to more a century of newspapers and more than half a century of TV news?
Given the layoffs of journalists throughout media, it seems the money for a building and its decade-long operations might have been better spent supporting the very media it enshrined. Although I’ve never been there, to me the Newseum appears to be more like a cemetery than an institution celebrating and supporting the viability of a free press.
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