The Newseum, a museum dedicated to the news business in Washington D.C., might be seven levels high, take up 250,000 square feet, and feature floors of multi-media displays on topics as wide-ranging as gangsters vs. the FBI (and the daily newspaper coverage of it) and the history of tabloid newspapers (with covers of the National Enquirer from the days it was talking about Elvis’s ghost) – but it has no space for alternative weeklies.
The alternative weekly was summed up behind a glass display with exactly one cover of the Village Voice and a paragraph saying alt-weeklies were born in the turbulent 1960s to cover news outside of the mainstream press.
That’s it! It made me sad for the men and women who made their lives’ work at alt-weeklies. Apparently, you weren’t really in the business of news distribution. Oops!
4 responses so far ↓
James P. Fisher // August 26, 2008 at 11:54 am |
As a longterm alt-weekly guy and a native of DC, it does not surpirse me. There is a long history of museums that miss whole swaths of the history they purport to cover. Perhaps a concerted effort from our industry can improve our presence there? AAN Central is,after all,located right in DC!
The Newseum screws over alt-weeklies | The Political Whore // August 26, 2008 at 1:00 pm |
[...] Weekly Planet contributor Gina Vivenetto takes the Newseum to task after a visit in which she found very little evidence of the alternative press. Here’s a sample: The alternative weekly [industry] was summed up [...]
theewhiteelephant // August 26, 2008 at 2:10 pm |
Ouch and it’s the Voice to boot. Maybe we should send them a copy of the 1972 Atlanta Creative Loafing?
Washington City Paper: City Desk - What’s the Point of the Newseum? // October 21, 2008 at 10:41 am |
[...] of Harper’s that had Seymour Hersh’s My Lai story, a copy of the Berkeley Barb (as at least one person has pointed out, one of the few examples of the alternative press on display), and televised [...]