If you’ve been to the Poynter Institute at any point since 1985, you’ve visited our current home on Third Street South in St. Petersburg, Florida.
You’ll know the entrance walkway where the First Amendment is etched into marble (and guarded from slippers by small orange cones on rainy days); the shady courtyard with the statue of the man reading a newspaper; and the vast Great Hall where people eat, gather and, sometimes, get married.
For a lot of people who’ve visited, it’s a special place. But it wasn’t Poynter’s first home.
The Modern Media Institute is pictured here in its first home in 1975. (Poynter file)
“New Modern Media Institute to locate in St. Petersburg,” read a May 30, 1975 headline in the St. Petersburg Times.
“The institute will not duplicate the work of any existing educational institute or school of communications or journalism,” the story read.
By September of that year, MMI had a home — Rutland Central Bank, previously the St. Petersburg Savings and Loan Association on Central Avenue. The terms of the lease: three years.
It would be more like 10.
In 1977, Nelson Poynter willed ownership of the Times Publishing Company to the Modern Media Institute.
“There are very few newspaper people who know when they wake up in the morning that they are not going to read that so-and-so has bought them out,” he said in a staff announcement. “We want to ensure that will not happen here.”
Poynter died in 1978. In 1983, MMI was renamed after its founder. In 1985, the Poynter Institute moved out of the old bank.
Here’s what that first decade looked like.
Poynter group photos are a long tradition. Here’s the first, from 1976. (Poynter file)
Eugene Patterson and Nelson Poynter, the publisher of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) and founder of the Modern Media Institute (now the Poynter Institute), are pictured at right, in 1977. Poynter is wearing his signature bowtie. (Poynter file)
Work by MMI students, pictured here in 1978, was regularly published by the St. Petersburg Times. (Poynter file)
Early MMI seminars included “layout and design, graphics, photojournalism, critical writing, opinion measurement and media management,” a newspaper ad explained. This photo is from 1979. (Poynter file)
A 1980 classified ad for the Modern Media Institute sought a “technician to supervise typelab operations: photolab experience and knowledge of newspaper production and terminology preferred.” (Poynter file)
In 1981, MMI added ethics to its curriculum, according to a St. Petersburg Times story. The new program, said executive director Donald Baldwin, would impart “a broad understanding of historic, ethical and moral philosophy and how it can be used to test ethical judgments in the newsroom.” (Poynter file)
Some things, like reporter’s notebooks pictured by two seminar participants in 1982, are timeless. (Poynter file)
And some things, like the light table pictured here in 1983, are not timeless. (Poynter file)
Roy Peter Clark, himself a Poynter institution, is pictured here in 1984. (Poynter file)
Poynter opened its current home, pictured here with literally the same carpet, in 1985. (Poynter file)
Comments