A Geat Story

I did a fascinating interview yesterday with Peter Prichard, the President of the Newseum, a 250,000 square foot new museum on the Mall in Washington, devoted to the news. It is one of a new generation of museums, devoted to ideas (the Constitution Center in Philadelphia is another example) and its largest funder is the Freedom Foundation, a non partisan group that is dedicated to free speech, free press and free spirit for all people. Prichard is a Dartmouth grad which is where the profile will ultimately run.

The Newseum is scheduled to open this spring and promises to be an amazing place to visit. The collection includes five decades of front page newspapers, television archives of great newscasts and events and internet reporting. This is actually the second Newseum, the first having existed in Arlington, Virgina for five years (1997-2001). They moved to have a greater impact, which I predict will be accomplished rapidly. I think it will be a place I will have a hard time leaving.

Prichard is a career journalist, having tried just about all forms of newspaper reporting from sports to editorials as well as television production. He was the third editor in chief of USA Today, which is where he met the Newseum's visionary, Al Neuharth, the founder of the Freedom Foundation. Proving that life is once again about connections, Prichard told me his big career break came when he worked as a speechwriter for Neuharth during his term as president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. They traveled to every state together since Neuharth had pledged he would speak in all fifty of them and Prichard drafted those speeches. The two formed a working relationship that remains to this day.

Toward the end of our conversation, Prichard asked me my story, which I told him in a nutshell. He didn't sound surprised about my current roller coaster ride through the publishing world--he is the author of a book about the founding of USA Today, but of course he had the credentials to write it--but he was surprised about the lukewarm reception to the Barbaro story itself. "It's a great story," he told me with all the conviction of a well-seasoned reporter. "Someone is going to grab it because great stories always sell."

I'd like to believe he's right.