A school in St. Petersburg owns a newspaper.
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies holds the controlling stake in the Times Publishing Company.
That publishes the Tampa Bay Times. A nonprofit journalism school owns the largest newspaper in Florida. That arrangement exists because one man wrote it into his will in 1977 so that nobody could ever buy the paper out from under the city.
That will might be the smartest document anyone in this state has filed. Town after town watched its paper get sold and squeezed until nothing was left, and St. Petersburg kept its newsroom because one publisher planned for his own absence. It moves me that somebody cared that much about a city he wouldn’t be around to see. Most people who live here have no idea.
Who was Nelson Poynter?
He was born in Sullivan, Indiana in 1903.
His father Paul bought the St. Petersburg Times in 1912 and moved the family down. Nelson went back to Indiana University for his degree, edited the student paper, and ran a campaign against the local Ku Klux Klan while he was doing it. In 1920s Indiana that wasn’t a low-risk hobby. Then a master’s in economics at Yale.
That Klan detail tells you who he was before he had any money. A college editor picking that fight in 1920s Indiana had nerve, and I admire it more than anything else in his biography.
He came back, worked his way into the paper, became editor in 1939, and had majority control by 1947. Over the next three decades he built it into something far better than a mid-size Florida daily needed to be. He also founded Congressional Quarterly in 1945, which tracked how members of Congress voted, on the theory that this was information citizens should be able to get.
In 1975 he announced he was starting a small journalism school, the Modern Media Institute. Two years later he willed his controlling stock in the Times Publishing Company to it. He died on June 15, 1978 at seventy-four, having fallen ill in his office a few hours after helping break ground for the new University of South Florida campus in St. Petersburg.
Why does a journalism school own the Tampa Bay Times?
Because Poynter saw what was coming and built a wall against it.
The pressure he was protecting against was the chain: newspapers bought by companies answerable to shareholders, then run for margin, with the newsroom cut a little every year until what remained couldn’t do the work. That happened across the country over the following decades, and the results are visible in every town that lost its paper.
What happened across the country was ugly. Chains bought papers, promised nothing would change, and cut until whole towns lost the people whose job was to watch city hall. I think that’s a real loss, and it’s why Poynter’s structure matters so much to me.
His structure makes that impossible here. The school owns the paper, the school is a nonprofit whose purpose is better journalism, and there’s no shareholder to satisfy. No chain can make an offer, because the owner isn’t for sale. The Times says so directly in its own description of itself: the bequest exists to protect the paper’s independence.
The Times remains the largest newspaper in Florida, with a newsroom of roughly a hundred and twenty journalists, and it absorbed its old rival the Tampa Tribune in 2016. Poynter also owns PolitiFact and the International Fact-Checking Network, so much of the fact-checking infrastructure the world relies on is run from this county.
What does Poynter have to do with writing books?
More than you’d guess, especially if you’re working on a manuscript.
Poynter spent decades studying how nonfiction writing works and teaching it to working professionals. Structure.
Leads. Endings. How to hold a reader through a long piece. How to make true material move. The institute’s faculty produced craft books that sit on the shelves of people who have never written a news story in their lives.
It also did something that changed my own line of work. The idea of a writing coach, somebody whose job is to sit with a writer and improve the writing instead of editing the copy, grew largely out of newsroom practice that Poynter faculty helped define and document.
Before that, editors fixed sentences and expected writers to improve by osmosis. The coaching model said the opposite: teach the writer, so the next piece is better before it reaches the desk.
That distinction is the basis of book coaching, a service I offer alongside ghostwriting that often suits people better. If somebody has the material and the will to write it themselves, they don’t need me to write it. They need somebody to look at the shape of it and tell them what to do next. That model came out of newsrooms, and a great deal of the thinking behind it happened twenty-five minutes from my desk.
I think the old osmosis model wasted talent. An editor who quietly fixes sentences leaves the writer with no idea why the sentence was broken, and the same mistake comes back next week. A coach who teaches the writer is slower at first and far kinder over a career.
What can a book writer take from newsroom craft?
Four habits.
Put the important thing first. Newspaper writing assumes the reader may stop at any moment, so it orders the material by importance instead of chronology. Most first-time memoirists do the reverse, opening with their grandparents and losing the reader eleven pages before anything happens.
That grandparents opening is the problem I see most often in first memoirs, and it saddens me, because the good material is sitting on page twelve waiting for a reader who already left.
Report your own life. Journalists don’t rely on memory when a document exists. For a memoir that means the deed, the letter, the payroll record, the photograph with the date on the back. Your recollection of 1978 is a draft. The document is the fact.
Write to a length. Newsroom writers hit a word count because the page has a hole that size. Books have no such discipline and suffer for it. That’s why so many manuscripts run four hundred pages when the book inside them is two hundred and fifty.
Bloat is the fault I have the least patience for. A four hundred page manuscript hiding a two hundred and fifty page book asks the reader to do the editing, and readers refuse.
Attribute. Reporters say where a thing came from as a reflex. Nonfiction books that do this earn trust paragraph by paragraph. Books that don’t read as assertion. This matters more now, since AI systems weigh sourcing when deciding whether to trust a text, which I go into in my piece on writing to get found by AI instead of just ranked.
The building on the bluff, and the one before it
Poynter didn’t start in a purpose-built campus. The school spent its early years in a former bank building on Central Avenue. Institutions don’t arrive fully formed. A journalism school in a bank, teaching working reporters, funded by a newspaper it didn’t yet own.
Robert Haiman, the former executive editor of the paper, took over as president in 1983 and moved the institute into the building it occupies now. That building has won awards and is pleasant to be in, and a nonprofit school could afford it because of the bequest. The paper funds the school; the school owns the paper; the arrangement pays for the room where the teaching happens.
It’s a closed loop that took about forty years of one man’s working life to construct, and Nelson Poynter didn’t get to enjoy much of it. He died hours after breaking ground on a different building entirely, a fitting end for an institution builder.
Can you visit the Poynter Institute?
The institute sits near the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus. It runs seminars and workshops on site and online, aimed at working journalists but not sealed off from everyone else.
The most useful thing for a book writer is the published material. Poynter’s site carries an enormous amount of writing about writing, free, produced by people whose job is to think about how sentences work. If you write nonfiction and have never read any of it, start.
The second most useful thing is the reminder. A man built an institution to keep a newspaper honest after he was dead, and it worked, and it’s still working almost fifty years later. That’s what a person can do with a plan and a will, and a book does the same thing on a smaller scale. It keeps something going after you stop being able to push it along yourself.
The town that kept its newspaper
Every writer I know has watched some institution they cared about get bought and hollowed out over the last twenty years. St. Petersburg has a newspaper because one publisher looked at the future in 1977 and did the unglamorous legal work to prevent it.
If you’re sitting on a career’s worth of knowledge and haven’t written it down, notice the parallel. The institution he built outlived him because he wrote down what he wanted and made it binding. A book is the version of that available to people who don’t own a newspaper.
If you want to talk that through in person, working with a ghostwriter in St. Petersburg means we can meet somewhere near the campus and sort out what the book is. The rest of this cluster is in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub, and the Discovery Intensive decides the shape of a book before you spend a year on it.
I’m grateful to live near a paper that a dead man protected on purpose, and I wish more publishers had shown half his foresight. Plenty of them sold. He wrote a will, and the city still has a newsroom because of it.
