Today was the last day for Newseum, the glassy, modernist museum on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. dedicated to the history and importance of the news media and the First Amendment.

There are no shortage of theories as to why the museum couldn’t make a go of it. The nonprofit Freedom Forum, its creator and principal investor, determined that the operating costs were unsustainable.

Perhaps the scale of the building was too ambitious, as the Freedom Forum spent $600 million on the project since it opened.

Perhaps it’s that the museum opened in 2008, on the cusp of the Great Recession, and never really recovered from the loss of benefactors in the upheaval of the news industry.

Or perhaps it was the ticket price. At almost $25 per adult, the Newseum had to compete with free, as in the zero admission cost of so many other D.C. attractions. As...