Joe Urschel

Executive director/senior vice president, Newseum

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Joe Urschel

Joe Urschel is executive director and senior vice president of the Newseum, the interactive museum of news which opened April 11, 2008, in Washington, D.C. He leads a team of news and museum professionals that spent the past six years developing content — exhibitions, video, interactive productions — and services for the seven-level, 250,000-square-foot museum.

Urschel was named executive director in June 1997, just two months after the original Newseum opened in Arlington, Va. From 1997 until the Newseum closed in March 2002, museum attendance grew from 414,000 in its first full year of operation to more than 482,000 visitors in 2001. In less than five years of operation in Arlington, the Newseum welcomed more than 2.25 million visitors.

Urschel joined the Newseum from USA TODAY, where he held several key roles during his 14-year career at the nation’s largest circulation newspaper. Those included managing editor/Life section, managing editor/special projects and senior writer. In addition, he wrote a twice-weekly column for the editorial pages.

He was a member of the team that developed “USA TODAY on TV,” a nationally syndicated daily news program, and worked as its supervising producer during its year-and-a-half-long run.

Urschel began his journalism career in high school, correcting proofs for Star-Tribune publications, a group of newspapers in suburban Chicago. He joined that group as a reporter and features editor after graduating from the University of Illinois in 1974. He later worked for the Detroit Free Press as a reporter, critic, associate magazine editor and assistant Sunday editor.

He sits on the board of directors of the InTune Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to improving the quality of life for children through educational excellence in music and the arts. The InTune Foundation is a programmatic function of the Nobel Foundation. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering.

His journalism honors include awards from the National Association of Newspaper Columnists and the National Association of Sunday and Feature Editors. He won an Emmy Award for a news documentary on campus crime that he wrote and co-produced.

He and his wife, Donna, a former reporter for the Detroit Free Press, have two children and live in McLean, Va.

(updated 4/09/07)