extra, extra, read all about it!

There's a lot of hype about the Newseum.  You could spend two days there.  It's the best museum ever.  I love it more than I love my children.  Really folks?  Never having seen it, I was pretty skeptical when we loaded up our four buses and 100 some-odd mentors and mentees.  We arrived about 10:15 this past Saturday morning.

At 12:30, about fifteen minutes before we were scheduled to depart, I was running around furiously to see if we could squeeze in another half hour and mentors and mentees were asking (begging to see) if our tickets were good for 48 hours.  The hype is well-deserved.

From a stunning set of Pulitzer Prize winning photographs on the first floor to the view (at right) from the sixth floor terrace, the place simply did not disappoint.  There are clips from the Daily Show, newspaper headlines from the past two centuries, and everything in between.  Mentors and Mentees gushed about the 4-D theater, the 9/11 exhibit, and the section of the Berlin Wall.  One mentor described this last highlight as "an exhibit that glorifies the breaking of one wall which makes us think of the others that are being built today."

No matter the exhibit, it was the hands-on nature of the whole experience that really moved the group.  Every floor has touchscreens and various ways to engage in the news and the history on display.  None of the exhibits, however, provided more immediate engagement than the Be a TV Reporter station pictured at the top of this page.  In that picture, Keona Archer and Aris Ellison are reporting while their mentors, YaVonne Dubose and Nidhi Patel, look on.  As Courtney Jones explains, "I was able to see a news reporter's point of view and to see how much they had to do.  Being a news reporter and getting out of my comfort zone was fun."