It’s so tempting to read the Newseum’s failure as a metaphor.

After years of financial struggles, the museum devoted to the free press announced that it was selling its decade-old building, a pristine, purpose-built facility with an unobstructed view of the Capitol, to Johns Hopkins University in January for $372.5 million. The Newseum’s loss is the university’s gain, as it gives Johns Hopkins space to consolidate four different properties in Washington, D.C., plus a seat in the room where it happens. For the museum’s part, during the same week that BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Gannett cut more than 1,000 jobs, the Newseum also announced that it was looking for new opportunities.

Overextended and out of options, the Newseum had considered risky strategies in recent years to get out from under its mountain of debt. The foundation that supports the museum nevertheless paid its president and CEO, Jeffrey Herbst, a salary of more than $630,000 in 2016 (the most recent year for which public records are available). The Newseum’s senior executives each commanded six-figure salaries, with several making five-figure bonuses on top. According to the museum’s tax filings, some trustees were even pulling down middle-class incomes for minimal board hours, which is unusual for any cultural nonprofit.

The foundering of the Newseum has the ring of a professional morality tale, one that could serve as a lens for examining the dismal state of journalism. Only it’s not a conceit. Recent setbacks for both the news and Newseum overlap in the figure of one executive: Allen Neuharth, the late USA Today founder who built the Gannett newsdaily behemoth. A dean of journalism who also founded the museum of journalism, Neuharth had a hand in bringing down both. If it is going to have any future, the Newseum needs to learn from those two failures.