Imagine being a media star like Peter Jennings or Diane Sawyer or the reporter who blew the lid off the latest big scandal.
Just grab a microphone and stand by as the setting of your choice flashes on the blue screen behind you. Perhaps it takes you right onto the White House lawn.
A TelePrompTer feeds the script as the camera takes you and the background in for 74 seconds — about 8.2 percent of the 15 minutes of fame pop artist Andy Warhol preached would be everyone’s birthright.
If the playback looks good enough for posterity, you can buy the videotape for $10. It could be the germ of a distinguished career. Then again, even if it isn’t any good, it set you back only 10 bucks.
At last, for visitors to the nation’s capital, there’s a place to actualize your fantasies about being a journalist. It’s the new $50 million Newseum in nearby Arlington, Va., the area’s latest cultural entree and the only state-of-the-art facility of its kind.
For a tryout in print journalism, move over to “Be a Reporter” on the nearby touch-screen monitor. The fast-paced game takes you to the mythical town of Medina, where contaminated cheese has felled students at the local school.
Check out such sources as the cafeteria workers, doctors and local officials for leads. Poke around various sites for more information — the school, library, city hall and the town dump — while a frantic editor monitors your progress with reminders of an approaching deadline.
At almost every turn, the free museum, which is a short subway ride from the prime tourist spots of downtown Washington, D.C., offers a gourmet feast for news gluttons.
Dominating the entrance is a giant suspended globe covered with the nameplates of newspapers from all over the world, ringed by a fast-moving electronic display with the latest headlines, sports scores and stock quotes.
Beneath the globe is a touch-screen video monitor, called “The Birthday Monitor,” on which visitors can call up the big story from the month and year of their birth as far back as 1900.
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“100,000 Chinese March” was the response when this reporter checked out his 1935 birth month.
Elsewhere, a block-long Video News Wall offers continually changing glimpses of breaking news via satellite and live reports. Below the video screen, printouts have been arranged of the day’s front pages from 70 newspapers from across the U.S. and around the world.
The museum also chronicles the story of how modern news gathering evolved from such ancient ways as trading stories around the campfire and at well-traveled crossroads.
Among the early news devices: knitted, multicolored cords that Inca messengers used for recording family events, crop yields and new laws; a papyrus newssheet from 59 B.C. that was posted daily in the Roman Forum; a German newsletter, circa 1400, bearing the drawing of a gallows, which translated as death to any dilatory messenger.
Funded by The Freedom Forum, a billion-dollar foundation that promotes freedom of the press, the Newseum is the work of the award-winning architect Ralph Appelbaum, who designed the capital’s Holocaust Museum.
Talking about his latest achievement, Appelbaum said recently he wanted the building to reflect the allure of a vocation that makes people risk their necks to get a story.
Although advertised as the place “where fun is a matter of fact,” the Newseum also commemorates the sober side of journalism.
In the adjoining Freedom Park, which overlooks Washington and the lush banks of the Potomac River, a stainless steel monument with glass panels pays tribute to more than 900 journalists who have died in the line of duty.
The museum shop also sells droll reminders of journalists’ highs and lows: figurines of office gods with names like Hernia (“juggles your struggles”) and Stressa (“calms your qualms”).