284 Years of News

One of the larger headlines in the Boston Chronicle of July 25, 1768 read: STRAYED. The copy beneath told of a lost "small red & white spotted cow"; the owner offered a reward of $2. Another item, headlined PROVIDENCE, told of that town's dedication of a "Great Elm Tree" to serve as its symbolic "Tree of Liberty." While digesting these and other colonial bulletins, a visitor to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington can wander backward or forward in American journalism to examine, say, the first regularly published newspaper in America (Boston News-Letter, 1704), or see news photos of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the 1937 crash of the Hindenburg.

These are among the ingredients of the Henry R. Luce Hall of News Reporting, which opens in the Smithsonian's Museum of History and Technology this week. The permanent exhibit, named for the co-founder of TIME and jointly financed by Time Inc. and the Smithsonian, aims at presenting a kinetic view of the people and technology of journalism. Though journalism may seem to be the most ephemeral of trades, dealing with instants perpetually displaced by fresher news, the exhibit shows that the industry has a complex and fascinating history.

Smithsonian Curator Peter Marzio has arrayed a compact but thorough review of 284 years of American journalism. The growth of newspapers, from gossipy 17th century village broadsides written by hand to today's metropolitan dailies is reflected by changing technology: the telegraph, steam engine (which transformed hand-operated printing presses), wireless, camera, typewriter.

Daily newsreels are shown in a small theater whose entrance has been reconstructed from fragments of Trans-Lux newsreel theaters in New York and Washington; during the opening weeks, films from the '30s will feature clips of Hitler addressing his countrymen. Vintage radio sets play actual news broadcasts; H.V. Kaltenborn's reports from London crackle from a 1939 RCA portable. Similarly, major television news stories are rebroadcast, ranging in time from celebrations of the conquest of Japan to the conquest of the moon. Once each day, a duplicate of the compact Apollo 11 TV camera will be demonstrated, allowing visitors to view themselves on the same video monitors that picked up Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon.

No exhibit on journalism would be complete without the Teletype machines that clack out the latest events in news offices around the world. At the Luce Hall, visitors can not only monitor incoming bulletins; they are also invited to take home samples of the wire-service copy that will appear under tomorrow's headlines.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.