Press Here Peter Prichard can’t stop gathering the news.

Media Junkies have made the Newseum, the interactive news museum in Arlington, Virginia, a success. They – and anyone else – can come here to read front-page headlines from 70 different newspapers, trace the history of news through multimedia exhibits, or go behind the scenes to see how TV news programs are produced.

The Newseum is the signature project of The Freedom Forum (formerly the Gannett Foundation), a nonpartisan international foundations dedicated to the freedom of the press. Peter S. Prichard, president of The Freedom Forum, the Newseum and The Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, has spent his adult life in the news business – as a reporter, editor in chief of USA Today, and the first director of the Newseum during its building phase in 1995. He’s also chairman of the National Press Foundation – and a watercolorist. Prichard’s paintings decorate his large Arlington office, overlooking the nation’s capital.

THE SHUTTLE SHEET: I understand the Newseum paid the District government $75 million plus a $25 million affordable-housing grant to move across the river into D.C. What can we expect?

PETER PRICHARD: We’re really reinventing. We bought property at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, between the White House and the Capitol. We plan to build a $150 million, 476,000-square-foot building, a major new Newseum there to open in 2005.

SS: You’re surrounded by newspapers from all over the world; how many do you read each day?

PP: At least four: the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. When you see newspapers from around the country, you read stories you don’t normally see.

SS: Do you read newspapers online?

PP: I read a lot of online news. It’s easy to catch up with the headlines online. My son Oliver is a police and courts reporter at the Journal Newsin White Plains (New York). I read his stories on the Web.

SS: Did you encourage your son to go into the newspaper business?

PP: He’s the fourth generation on my wife’s side to work for a Gannett newspaper. My wife, Ann, is a book reviewer for USA Today.

SS: What are some of the changes you’ve seen in the newspaper business?

PP: There’s much more media and it’s much more competitive today. When I was in college in the 60’s there were three networks and no cable. Walter Cronkite was the king of nightly news shows, and more than half the country watched his show every night. Now more than half the country never watches anything unless it’s a Super Bowl or a live episode of “Seinfeld.”

SS: What about balancing the race to be right with the race to be first?

PP: Newspapers were sucked into that too much during the Monica Lewinsky story. In the rush to be first, they forgot that they have to be accurate. That happened again on election night when you had [to make] a call too early. If I were in television, I’d consider projections. I don’t think the rush to be first is good for journalism, nor does it gain respect among readers.

SS: You mentioned Walter Cronkite earlier. How would you compare him to broadcasters today, who are almost celebrities?

PP: He was a huge star. There will never be another Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America. When he came out against the Vietnam War, it was a national story. That won’t happen again. The media world is too splintered, and nobody has that much influence in the news business. And even though Walter Cronkite was that famous, he was eminently fair and very rarely injected himself into a story.

SS: Where do you draw the line between entertainment and journalism? On which side does Larry King fall?

PP: I think that’s a shifting line. Right now the pendulum has swung pretty far towards entertainment, and I’d like to see it more towards serious journalism. And talk shows on cable have tried so hard to be entertaining that they’ve lost some of their journalistic value to the now prevalent shouting and partisanship. But I take a broad definition of journalism; that’s what we’ve done here. I think sometimes Oprah (Winfrey) is a journalist, although I don’t think her everyday job is as a journalist. Larry King is basically an entertainer, but he’s doing a form of journalism.

SS: What do you see as the future of newspapers?

PP: I think newspapers will have a good future. People said radio would replace newspapers, then television would replace newspapers, and now the internet will replace newspapers. None of that has happened. Newspapers are, as (USA Todayfounder) Al (Neuharth) always says, “highly portable.” You can take them to the bathroom with you, read it on the subway. They’re easier to use than the Internet, and they have the best news-gathering staff of any form of media: more reporters, editors and critics, and the most talent…the best journalists.

-Karen Feld