Taylor-Rae Collins-Headley is a senior broadcast journalism major at Howard University. Originally from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, she now resides in Washington D.C. This blog and its contents are all her original opinions, ideas, and musings. It also serves as a requirement for completion of the Howard University Newsvision Course. Feel free to leave a comment below!
Monday, November 11, 2013
NewsVision at the Newseum
Newseum Celebrates Freedom.
First Amendment on the Newseum Wall
On Tuesday November 5, 2013 the Howard University NewsVision class, a group of seniors in the final course of their broadcast journalism major, went to the Newseum. Opened on April 11, 2008, the Newseum is a 250,000 square foot museum of news which, according to its website, "offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits. The Newseum is just a stones throw from the Smithsonian, the White house, and the Capitol buildings, and with millions of visitors over the past five years, it has become one of Washington D.C's most popular attractions.
As we entered the museum, many of us had been there before and were excited to see the new exhibits the museum had to offer. The first exhibit we made it to was the ethics exhibit. Inside was a touchscreen ethics video game on an elliptical shaped table with spots for about 10 players split into two teams. The goal of the game was to grab virtual note cards with ethical situations on them and decide whether or not the course of action was ethical. The team who made the most ethical decision in the least amount of time won. Naturally as a well trained journalist my team won every time... though it helped that the other team's board had a technical glitch. Around the walls of the room booths with headphones and a video screen asked ethical questions pertaining to real-life decisions made by professional journalists and asked the viewer what they would do.
Kevin Carter and his Pulitzer winning photo.
In one situation there was a photo of a small malnourished child with a large buzzard perched next to her as she crawled towards help. The question asked if you would take the picture of the child and not help her, or if you would not take the picture and try to get the girl help. This turned out to be the story of Kevin Carter, a photo journalist working in the Sudan at the time, who came upon the girl as her parents were getting food from U.N. workers. Carter shooed the bird away after taking the picture but did not help the girl.
We then moved on to an area where you could film news stand-ups in front of a green screen as if you were really reporting live on the scene and take pictures in the Newseum "studio". My stand-up on the Supreme Court is below. This was a lot of fun because it gave us the opportunity to see what life will, hopefully, be like after graduation. We made a brief stop by the 9/11 exhibit where we were able to see Newspapers from around the world depicting the attack, pieces of the building, and a memorial to Bill Biggart, the journalist who died when the last tower fell.
On another floor, in an exhibit dedicated to black and female journalists through history, there was a large display featuring newspapers from various years in the past. I took a picture of the magazine from the year I was born, and at the risk of dating myself, it mentioned Clinton on the campaign trail before his first victory. We then watched a film about black journalists covering the civil rights era including the freedom rides and sit-ins and the police brutality in Birmingham.
After that, the class was released to its own devices and a friend and I decided to go see the 4-D movie they were playing in one of the theaters. What makes the film 4-D is the fact that while the 3-D movie is playing the chairs move as if you are really experiencing the action on screen. The movie was basically a "time travel" through journalistic history in which you got to go back and see the journalists as they were in their time and the circumstances that led them to be included among the field's greatest. One such journalist was Nellie Bly who helped launch the field of investigative journalism when she went undercover as a mental patient at Bellevue Hospital in New York and Edward R. Murrow as he did a live broadcast about bombs in London during WWII.
We then moved on to an area where you could film news stand-ups in front of a green screen as if you were really reporting live on the scene and take pictures in the Newseum "studio". My stand-up on the Supreme Court is below. This was a lot of fun because it gave us the opportunity to see what life will, hopefully, be like after graduation. We made a brief stop by the 9/11 exhibit where we were able to see Newspapers from around the world depicting the attack, pieces of the building, and a memorial to Bill Biggart, the journalist who died when the last tower fell.
On another floor, in an exhibit dedicated to black and female journalists through history, there was a large display featuring newspapers from various years in the past. I took a picture of the magazine from the year I was born, and at the risk of dating myself, it mentioned Clinton on the campaign trail before his first victory. We then watched a film about black journalists covering the civil rights era including the freedom rides and sit-ins and the police brutality in Birmingham.
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