Although The Poynter Institute’s “official” 30th birthday is not until November 10, this coming Sunday will also be a special day in the history of the school.
Thirty years ago Sunday, on May 29, 1975, Nelson Poynter announced that the Modern Media Institute would be started and that Donald K. Baldwin, former editor of the St. Petersburg Times, would become the Institute’s first director. (In 1984 the school changed its name from the Modern Media Institute to The Poynter Institute.)
In a 1984 interview Don Baldwin described how the Institute started:
Back as early as 1960, Poynter was talking about doing something of an educational nature. At that time he had the feeling that something needed to be done for younger reporters. Our original working title was ‘Junior API.’ Poynter was afraid that on his death we would be forced to sell the paper. He wanted to create something that would improve the breed, that would make newspapers better. He worked long and hard on the plans for this Institute. He gave his personal fortune to the future of newspapers. He is trusting Gene Patterson and he’s trusting the person Gene picks to succeed him, and so on, to continue the things that Nelson stood for.
I was the director and was all by myself until Marge Bratcher came aboard. The two of us moved into that bank building all by ourselves. We began to experiment with programs. At first, when Poynter was alive, we were very small and we deliberately stayed that way. We had a limited budget, and what we were doing was experimenting. He (Mr. Poynter) was excited. He thought we were on the right track.
In a 1977 interview Nelson Poynter talked about the Modern Media Institute:
Modern Media Institute is going to be something big and important. It has to live modestly for quite a number of years, but its job is to help train the people who are going to help maintain the stability, the progress, the integrity of self-government, which I mentioned before, from a historic standpoint, is still a very frail, and a very new experiment.
Modern Media Institute, which Don Baldwin heads, will be my chief heir. It already has the stock in the Times Holding Company that was owned by the Poynter Fund and its proxy will go to Gene Patterson after I’m gone. The Times Publishing Company, of course, will continue to pay corporate taxes, and so forth.
Modern Media Institute will be something the staff is tremendously proud of because it’s dedicated to one thing and that is to make modern media on which self-government rests better and more responsive to the people of this country.
During a 1977 Times general staff meeting Nelson Poynter said the following about his new school:
MMI’s job is simply to be way, way ahead — to fill gaps in journalistic training not being filled by existing institutions. It already has made a handsome start in that direction.
Modern Media Institute is precisely what its name says. It is an educational institution set up to be ever modern, deeply concerned with training people in making our media better. Since it has to start small, it is taking the subject we know most about, the printed media, for most of its seminars and classes now.
Our society is changing so much from year to year that any medium, whether printed or electronic, must keep up with these changing interests of the people in communicating with each other, or that medium will die.
In many ways, MMI is a more organized version of what The Times Publishing Company has been trying to do in the past 30 or 40 years, improving techniques and ways of communicating with people.
…I think it will be always alert to the new ways and means of communicating and delivering information. But it will concentrate, as I anticipate, upon the more intangible aspects of communications.
…It is something I think the staff of The Times Publishing Company will take pride in as the years go on.
