Tweet22-07-2011 om 16:58 by Sueli Brodin

After a complete renovation and redesign which lasted a few years, the International Newspaper Museum in Aachen has reopened its doors to the public since early July.

It is located on the Pontstrasse, just off the Town Hall square, in one of the city's oldest town houses called The Great House of Aachen.



The museum is based on the collection of the Aachen-born private scholar Oskar von Forckenbeck (1822-1898), who collected first and last editions as well as anniversary and special editions of international newspapers during his many travels. The museum says it boasts "the world's largest collection of newspapers, with well over 200,000 issues from the 17th to the 21st century."





As part of its redesign, the museum now goes beyond the realm of newspapers and has a broader focus on the media in general.



The International Newspaper Museum is included in the Route Charlemagne which runs through the city and highlights its rich historic and cultural heritage.



Did you know that Paul Julius Reuter first founded the Reuters News Agency in Aachen? In the 1850s, Reuter began using the newly opened Berlin-Aachen telegraph line to send news to Berlin. There was, however, a 122 km gap in the line between Aachen and Brussels, Belgium's financial centre, which Reuter cleverly bridged by using homing pigeons. The carrier pigeons were much faster than the post train, giving Reuter faster access to stock news from the Paris stock exchange.  (Source: Wikipedia)




The exhibition itself is divided into five main themes:

1. From event to news: what is the work of news agencies and journalists and how does an event become news?


2. Media for the masses: what is mass communication and what are its social impacts?


3. Reading and writing: a historical overview


4. Lies and truths: can we believe and trust everything we read and see in the media? What is press freedom?


5. Insights – perspectives: what is the future of media?

The museum makes wide use of multimedia resources through interactive touch screens and audio and visual material.



The explanations are available in four languages: German, English, French and Dutch.



The museum gives a broad overview of the various aspects of the media industry and serves a clear educational purpose.



I found it interesting to learn for example that  the German merchant and banker of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Jacob Fugger is thought to have created the first business newsletter and to have founded the first news agency "by collecting news of evolving business climate as well as current events from his agents all across Europe and distributed them to all his branches."



My family and I greatly enjoyed going through the front pages of old newspapers on display, featuring breaking news headlines such as "Man takes first steps on the moon" on a july 1969 edition the local Limburgs Dagblad...



... "Napoleon prisoner!" on the German newspaper Ubendblatt, announcing Napoleon III's capture during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871).



The museum's collection also includes an original edition of the French paper L'Aurore, dated 13 January 1898, which gave its front page to Emile Zola's famous open letter to the French President titled "J'Accuse...!", in which he accused the French government of anti-semitism in the Dreyfus Affair.



In the "Reading and Writing" section, a large interactive screen allowed visitors to get an overview of newspapers all over the world, with facts and figures on readership and distribution.



The insights on the current state and the future of the media provided by four media professionals were in my view an especially instructive and thought-provoking part of the exhibition.



"Will people in the future be more interested in local or global news?"

"What impact will online interactive media have on our democratic structures?"

"Do mass media have a future, or will the fragmentation of information channels increase to beyond recognition?"





The four media professionals, Sonia Mikich, Kai Diekmann, Wim Veen and Heribert Prantl, all had different or complementary insights on the topics.



Obviously, the exhibition also dealt with the important themes of news reliability and press freedom and showed some striking illustrations of controversial and unethical media practices.



At the end of the visit, we were invited to step into an "egg" and experience the chaos of media and the meaning of "media sensory overload".  I must admit, however, that I'm not quite sure I fully grasped what the idea behind this was.



The museum actually turned out to be smaller than I had originally thought, so while my children and husband continued their exploration of Aachen's treasures just across the street, I decided to visit it all over again on my own and take a few more pictures.

The media: such a fascinating topic!

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