And we think today’s reporters have it tough.

Picture this: To land a job, the journalistic aspirant known to history as Nellie Bly agrees to feign mental illness in order to uncover abuses at the notorious asylum for women on Blackwell’s Island. In a new “4-D” version of this familiar tale at the Newseum, an editor warns the plucky Bly of the obvious dangers involved. But how else is a Victorian woman to gain street cred as a reporter?

We see and hear what Bly would later describe in her 1887 articles for the New York World. Here are the women tied together at the waist like a prison work gang or forced to sit all day on straight-back wooden benches; the unfeeling attendants laughing at their charges and confiscating Bly’s notebook; a well-spoken inmate who attests to her sanity, but may well be driven mad by the asylum regime.

After pushing away a plate of inedible food and submitting to an icy bath, Bly is thrust back into her tiny cell. A rat scurries across the floor and leaps into bed beside her. Horrified, she flicks it in our direction. Yikes! Fur seems to brush the backs of our legs. How on earth, we wonder, did they do that?

It would probably be unfair to suggest that this frightening intimacy with a rodent is the emotional highlight of the Newseum experience. But it is certainly among this new institution’s most memorable thrills. More than six years in the making, this $450 million, 250,000-square-foot behemoth bills itself as “the world’s most interactive museum”—a whiz-bang homage to a profession still wrestling with the perils and promise of new media. As old-line journalism flounders, the Newseum salutes its past. But does it also augur its future?

...

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.