Students visit the Newseum

By Dan LaVoie

WASHINGTON, March 23- The Newseum, the nation's foremost museum dedicated to the art of journalism, takes visitors behind the scenes to experience the who, what, where, when, why and how of the news business. On a crisp spring morning, the Boston University Washington Journalism Center took a break from their jobs as working Congressional correspondents to tour the museum's exhibits.

The Newseum's featured exhibition, "The Pulitzer Prize Photographs: Capture the Moment," is the first U.S. exhibition to bring together Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs from 1941-the year they first became eligible-to the present day. More than 100 photographs are featured, accompanied by the stories behind the photographs that won journalism's most prestigious award.

BU senior Meredith Warren said she was profoundly affected-emotionally and intellectually-by the photos, many of which featured wartime atrocities or civil-rights era clashes.

"They took my breath away," she said.

The stories behind the photographs were often the most touching. One prize-winner-whose photograph featured an emaciated African toddler crouched on the ground while a vulture eyed him in the distance-committed suicide less than a year after winning because his conscience gnawed at him for taking the picture instead of helping the child. The passions of the each photojournalist shined brightly in their work.

"I found it amazing that they could capture that much emotion and be so powerful in one simple photograph," BU junior Jessica Schneider said.

The exhibit, which opened in November last year and will run through May 4, is the largest exhibition of Pulitzer-winning photographs ever assembled, according to the Newseum.

The Newseum also offers visitors the chance to be reporters or television newscasters; relive the great news stories of all time through multimedia exhibits, artifacts and news memorabilia; and see today's breaking news as it happens on a block-long video news wall. Each morning, the curators display the front page of a newspaper from each state to demonstrate the different ways each day's news is played and written about across the country.

LeAnne Gendreau, a graduate student in the magazine journalism track, said that the museum offered a true-to-life journalism experience.

"I thought it was fabulous, moving, inspiring and reinforced why I wanted to become a journalist," she said. "Simply put, it's better than Cats."