March 18, 2008
Behind the scenes at the Newseum
AU makes a difference
(Photos by Jeff Watts)
A few years ago, Jessica Hall, SOC ’00, was an intern clipping newspapers. Now she leads a crack team of digital media masters at the most interactive museum in the world.
A few years ago, Sonya Gavankar had a fresh AU degree and an entry-level job as a Newseum production assistant. Now an animated version of Gavankar hosts the News Trivia game on the museum’s Web site, and the real-life Gavankar, SOC ’99, will be hosting live quiz shows and other programs in the museum’s new $450 million building on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Everywhere they go in the Newseum, the School of Communication (SOC) alumnae run into other alumni and faculty who are key to what visitors will experience when the museum opens Apr. 11 in its new location after six years of construction and planning.
Stand in front of a camera as a TV reporter in the Interactive Newsroom. Play a game on the First Amendment. Click on the names at the interactive memorial wall to fallen journalists. Alumni and faculty worked on all of these.
Head to the News History gallery with its five centuries of news; the explanatory labels were written by an SOC professor. So was the content of a 193-county international database on press freedom in the World News gallery.
Cutting-edge technology packs the 250,000 square feet museum of the news. Hall walks up to one of her projects, a disc-shaped table that could have come from Star Trek, and waves her arm. A question appears on the table’s translucent surface: If the son of a rival paper’s editor was arrested for drunk driving, would you report it?
This is the Ethics Table, where players compete to be fastest at making ethical choices. Hall, a multimedia producer, was the game’s team leader; many of the questions were written by longtime TV news producer Jerry Grossman, SOC ’68, who spent nearly three decades at Washington’s WUSA-TV (Channel 9) before becoming a Newseum producer, working on videos whose subjects range from John F. Kennedy to sports history.
Such intersections are common around the Newseum. “There are a ton of us here from AU,” says Gavankar, who worked with Hall, for instance, on “Race for Your Rights,” an interactive game on the First Amendment for which Katie Walker, SOC/CAS ’05, contributed some huffing and puffing, hurdle-jumping background sound.
The $450 million museum aims to immerse visitors in the behind-the-scenes drama of the news business through seven levels of multimedia galleries rich with hands-on exhibits and activities.
To make that happen, it needed to find people with a flair for thinking outside the box and skills that range across the media landscape. “I can shoot and edit video, because I did a lot of that at AU,” says Hall. “If I need to write a story for the Web site, I can do that. If I need to produce video, I can do that.”
It’s not just that the Newseum needed people who understand journalism; it also needed people who could work at a breakneck pace, since exhibits will change to keep up with the news. “Museums generally work on things for two years,” says Hall, who has also been a Smithsonian Fellow in Museum Practice. “This place really operates more like a news organization. It’s really a living, breathing, active, hyperactive place.”
SOC professor Joe Campbell has been involved in the action for years. His ties go back to the Newseum’s former site in Rosslyn, Va., which opened in 1997, around the time Campbell, a veteran reporter and foreign correspondent, started his career as an AU professor.
His research interests in international news and news history led him to consulting work for the Newseum. As the Newseum has been gearing up to reopen at its vast new site, Campbell has been busy. He wrote explanatory labels for historic newspapers, the digital “Great Books” display, and the magazine collection, and he wrote first drafts for the labels of the exhibit that features part of the Berlin Wall.
He conducted research into war correspondents named on the Journalists Memorial, tracked down the word for “news” in some 50 languages for a display called “News in 100 Languages,” and wrote much of the international database for the digital kiosks in the World News gallery.
At the Newseum, there are media screens everywhere with constant live updates; they’re kept running in part by people like Darryl Patterson, SOC ’02, who works in the master control room that is visible through glass windows.
AU people have even helped bring the Newseum to one of the most cutting-edge spots in cyberspace. Glenn Luther ’07, manager of SOC’s computing labs, was behind the project to recreate the Newseum in digital form in “Second Life,” an online virtual reality platform with 20 million registered accounts. The members, or their avatars, can tour and hold real-time meetings in virtual spaces that look almost exactly like the real Newseum, and were developed by Luther and fellow “Second Life” technorati.
The real halls of the Newseum are filled with people like filmmaker Frank Phillippi, who has taught at AU’s Washington Semester and is recording the project’s history for posterity, and Roxanna Rivera, SOC ’99, who promotes the museum at tourist industry conventions. Anna Frueh, SOC/SIS ’07, learned of a job opening during Campbell’s class and went to work the day after graduation.
“Every day, there’s something different,” she says. “I saw them physically push in the helicopter that is now hanging in the atrium. I got to watch them hang the satellite we have.”
She even has her own hard hat, onto which she tacked an AU logo. “This is such a unique experience. It truly is. And we have our own little AU family here.”
