The institution will remain open through 2019 and museum executives will spend that time trying to find a new space for its contents.
“This was a difficult decision, but it was the responsible one,” Jan Neuharth, chairwoman and chief executive of the Freedom Forum, said in a statement released Friday. “We remain committed to continuing our programs — in a financially sustainable way — to champion the five freedoms of the First Amendment and to increase public awareness about the importance of a free and fair press. With today’s announcement, we can begin to explore all options to find a new home in the Washington, D.C., area.”
For Johns Hopkins, the purchase will allow the university to expand and consolidate its presence in the nation’s capital.
The university said in a statement that, “anchored by the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins’ expanded presence in Washington, D.C., will increase our capacity to convene and inform decision-makers, contribute to national and international policy development and forge exciting new connections to our home city of Baltimore.”
The decision to sell came after a 16-month review that left the museum’s future unclear. The Newseum has struggled financially ever since it moved from Rosslyn, Virginia, where it originally opened in 1997, to its Pennsylvania Avenue location in 2008. It ran up deficits every year and has hundreds of millions of dollars of debt resulting from the purchase of the building. In 2017, the most recent year for which numbers are publicly available, the museum had a deficit of roughly $5 million.
According to the Newseum, it set out to find a partner that would allow it to remain in the building, which the Freedom Forum built for $450 million. But conversations with philanthropists didn’t pan out. Museum officials then tried to find a way to share the space in the seven-story building, through lease buybacks and other avenues. Ultimately, though, the museum said it found that selling the building was the only path forward.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.