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Today's Front Pages from Around the World...
Newseum:
Online and at the corner of Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. in Washington D.C. (future site of the new Newseum building), you can visit virtually or peruse the outdoor exhibit to compare todays Page One news coverage from all U.S. states plus a selection of international newspapers.
Newseum staff arrive at the current Arlington, VA headquarters as early as 4:30 a.m. each day to begin downloading and organizing up to 140 front page color submissions, sent to Newseum via the Internet. Sixty eight will be posted on the walls of the construction site, full size and in color, protected from the elements by lexan covers and an overhead canopy (all the better for casual browsing).
A recent weekend trip to the National Gallery took me to the nearby corner, where I stopped to look at the headlines and graphics. At first I noted how many had President Bush on the cover, the new Pentagon photos of caskets, and then saw the kind of news item that is easily missed when on vacation and not reading the paper regularly...the discovery of the previously thought to be extinct ivory-billed woodpecker.
It began appearing in front page after front page, so I began again, at the beginning of the wall. I got a new snapshot of the world for that day--which paper reported it, and in what region/city was it? Did it get a paragraph at the bottom corner, or was it headline news? Did the international papers pick up on it?
South Carolina devoted three-fourths of the front page to the wily woodpecker, understandably, since it was re-discovered in the South. Fargo had a brief mention. The NJ Star Ledger thought it was more important to share the news that a pair of 9/11 terrorists used library computers at the state college to order their airline tickets...and Le Monde and Il Gazzettino (Italy) reported nary a bird.
An amazing richness of news and graphics, the Newseum site offers a fast glimpse of the world and how places view their world (large and small) on a given day. The D.C. site is fascinating, and by the time I finished carefully looking, reading, smiling, commenting, there were at least twenty others who were compelled to stop and read the news from around the world and ponder with me the European editorial cartoon about the new Airbus A380.
Newseum, the Interactive Museum of News is now a daily must for me--rich graphic options lead you in, from rolling over the small graphics at the top of the screen, to the NewsMania Quiz Game, archived pages, the map where you can select a place, or the best feature: Today's Front Pages--433 front pages from 44 countries, in alpha order. They display in thumbnails, four dozen at a time, for fast comparisons. Pause over one, and a larger color image displays on the right. Click, and you have a full pdf file to read.
Take a world tour, every day, and surprise yourself with what front pages can tell you and offer for research. Or quick reading! And stop by that display wall in D.C. next time you're there, for the real thing and the experience of it in the nation's capital.
Posted by Karen Oye on June 3, 2005 12:54 AM
