Newseum opens Friday
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
The Newseum, the “world’s most interactive museum,” is scheduled to open April 11. The facility cost $450 million and spreads across seven levels and 250,000 square feet of exhibit space; it houses 15 theaters, including one where audiences experience “4-D time-travel.” The Newseum is nonprofit and privately financed.
“We ran out of room at the old Newseum,” explained Charles Overby, a former editor of Gannett newspapers in Florida, Tennessee and Mississippi and the CEO of the Newseum. The original Newseum was attracting about a half-million visitors a year, needed to expand and couldn’t find room nearby.
“Our mission is to educate as many people as possible about the First Amendment,” he said. “We decided to move to fish where the fish are” in an ideal location, in sight of the Capitol and Supreme Court.
