The Newseum is increasingly relevant, but can it survive?

The front pages of newspapers telling of the 9/11 attacks are prominently on display at the Newseum here. Sixteen years later, their headlines still scream.

“AMERICA’S DARKEST DAY,” declares The Detroit Free Press, all in caps.

“‘EVIL ACTS,’” shouts The Miami Herald.

In a screening room nearby, journalists talk on video about their experiences that day. A box of tissues is within arm’s reach.

If journalism is history written in the moment, there are few more compelling places to appreciate that than the Newseum, a cathedral to the craft, on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“This is probably one of the most memorable things that most people experience when they come here: the top of the 9/11 tower,” the museum’s chief operating officer, Scott Williams, said as he pointed toward an exhibit of looming debris recovered from the attacks. But just as the profession it celebrates  is in distress — struggling financially in the internet age and attacked as purveyors of “fake news” — so, too, is the Newseum.

The Newseum has run up deficits every year since it opened a grand new home in 2008. Though it attracts a respectable number of visitors (820,000 expected this year) who pay top dollar ($24.95 for adults) in a city filled with free museums, the institution is simply not taking in enough money to cover its bills. It still owes roughly $300 million on its new building, and the interest rates on the loans spiked last year. Its fund-raising has long been sluggish for a museum with a $61 million operating budget. It relies each year on large infusions of money from the Freedom Forum, the foundation that created the museum and has given it more than $500 million over the last 20 years.

“They have one significant donor, and that’s a risky proposition,” said Susie Wilkening, an independent museum consultant. “Because what happens when that significant donor decides, “This may not be what I want to be doing with my assets’?” In fact, the Freedom Forum, which champions the First Amendment and whose own endowment has shrunk since the recession, now says it cannot continue to support the Newseum at the same level. In 2015, the most recent year for which financial statements are available, the Forum provided $21.4 million, or more than a third of the museum’s budget. It also took in $7.5 million in admissions. Still, the museum ran up a $2 million deficit.

©2017 The New York Times News Service