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Front pages mark moments in time

Commentary

By Charles L. Overby
Chairman and CEO, The Freedom Forum

06.15.99

Front Pages R Us.

That's the way it seems at The Freedom Forum and the Newseum. Everywhere you turn there are front pages — historic, current, birthday-oriented, themed.

Front pages show a slice of life in an incomparable way. We're using front pages with increasing frequency to show that the media are not monolithic and never have been. Two exhibits opened this month on opposite sides of the world that drive home the point.

• The 'Dateline Moon' exhibit at the Newseum — commemorating the 30th anniversary of man walking on the moon — displays 150 front pages from around the world, ranging from Neil Armstrong's hometown newspaper ('Neil Steps on the Moon') to The New York Times devoting major space to a poem by Archibald MacLeish, 'Voyage to the Moon.'
• A display of front pages covering the protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing 10 years ago opened at the Asian Center in Hong Kong. Arnold Zeitlin, director of the center, said some headlines focused on deaths, and others ignored the violence. The Sunday Morning Post of Hong Kong trumpeted the 'Beijing Bloodbath: 57 Killed by Troops,' but People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, led with 'Cotton Industry's Management in Chaos' — disregarding Tiananmen altogether.

Those special exhibits augment our daily emphasis on front pages. At a museum of news, you would expect to see historic front pages, and we have hundreds of them. Some original front pages about historic events over the past two centuries are displayed. Scores of other front pages flash on screens for visitors to view. This feature also is displayed in our traveling exhibit, Newseum's NewsCapade with Al Neuharth.

But the most exceptional exhibit of front pages in the Newseum involves current front pages from across the USA and around the world, every day.

Fleet Dalby, manager/technical operations, oversees an effort that starts shortly after midnight as we begin to collect, via computer, digitized front pages from 75-95 communities. Dalby calls it 'a marvel.' I call it a miracle.

Michael Skelly arrives at 5 a.m. to sort through the e-mails, which have images of the front pages attached. The front pages, from as far away as Tokyo and Hong Kong, are scanned, printed and displayed before the Newseum opens.

The unsung heroes are the newspaper staffers in local communities who send these pages after doing their regular work.

Newseum visitors are surprised to read front pages from their home state or country and even more surprised to see that they are that day's front pages.

This exhibit is important because it refutes the view that all media are the same.

Eric Newton, managing editor of the Newseum (the world's only managing editor of a museum!), loves this subject and talks intelligently and metaphorically about his insights gained from studying these front pages daily.

'The front pages are more like snowflakes than snowdrifts,' Newton said.

'The pages are different on far more days than they are the same.'

As popular as those exhibits are, the most popular pages are featured in our Birthday Banner interactive exhibit. Visitors specify their birth date and see news of that month and year, including prices of staple goods.

We give away printouts of the Birthday Banner on NewsCapade and have been surprised to find that we've been handing out more pages than there are visitors. That's because people are so fascinated they take an extra one home for a family member or friend.

As we continue to learn at The Freedom Forum and the Newseum, front pages are much more than displays of news. They are daily works of art — time capsules that help us mark our place today and in the future.