Stay tuned, folks!
The exhibit should be a crowd-pleaser. But that’s only part of the strategy behind it. DuMont, producer and broadcaster of the 35-year-old syndicated show Beyond the Beltway (recently dropped by WLS but available through other outlets), says the financially pinched MBC is aiming for “greater awareness of who we are with the major consumer brand companies.” He’s hoping some of them will decide to put an executive on the museum’s board.
But it’s been a long slog. After DuMont moved the museum out of the Cultural Center in 2003, he fought for years to get a total of nearly $10 million in state funding for the $25 million facility, only to find himself saddled with another set of challenges after its 2012 opening. Attendance dropped drastically, from 225,000 annual visitors when MBC was at the Cultural Center and free to 7,300 last year at the current entrance fee of $12. Then in 2013, what DuMont describes as a “server crash” destroyed access to the 10 percent of the museum’s archive of radio and television programming that had been digitized and made available to the public for free.
