It’s like asking which of your children do you love best!” Jeffrey Herbst says when I ask him to name his favorite display at the Newseum. Herbst, 54, is the new president and CEO of the nine-level museum of news and journalism, and on this chilly fall day in late October, he is giving me the grand tour. One of the first stops is “Reporting Vietnam,” a temporary exhibit about the role of journalism, and in particular television, during the Vietnam War. It features newspapers and magazines and footage from broadcasts of the day, including scenes from the jungle interspersed with shots of Walter Cronkite telling CBS viewers: “The only rational way out will be as negotiators, not as victors.”
“Nobody had ever seen something like this before,” Herbst tells me of those wartime broadcasts. “Suddenly it was like war was in the living room.”
The disruptive role of technology is something that has long interested Herbst. Before starting at the Newseum in August, he was president of Colgate University, where, beyond his administrative duties, he focused on the larger question of how technological change was going to “disrupt” college and university education, including whether students would even continue to attend brick-and-mortar institutions. His current job offers him a new perspective. “I was very interested to come here,” Herbst tells me, “because, of course, technological disruption of the media is already occurring.”