The temple housing Nelson Poynter’s holy relics of journalism is located outside of downtown St. Petersburg, on a sunny chunk of Florida real estate just a stone’s throw from America’s only museum dedicated to the surrealist master Salvador Dalí. Visiting both buildings in quick succession, as I did last summer, offers an interesting study in contrasts. Dalí’s work highlights the transient nature of reality, invoking an often-nightmarish landscape. Across the street, the Poynter Institute exudes a kind of stately permanence and clarity of purpose, which is exactly what its founder sought in creating a haven for journalism.

With the profession facing its own nightmarish landscape these days, many journalists have expressed a renewed appreciation for the nonprofit Poynter Institute and the newspaper it owns, the St. Petersburg Times. Visiting the institute’s tidy campus, it’s easy to see why. Here is a true refuge: a place where reverence for newspaper culture is on conspicuous display, in a facility that is part museum, part library, part school, and wholly consumed by its mission to promote the cause of journalism.

Perhaps that’s why in recent years the story of Nelson Poynter and his institute has become something of a soothing bed-time story for traumatized journalists. While reporters are forced to endure draconian cuts in their own newsrooms—many of them enacted (as journalists see it) by mutton-headed managers with their eyes riveted on the bottom line—they can still dream of a land not too far away where a well-tended band of scribes toils under the benevolent gaze of ownership unconcerned with trivial matters such as EBITDA and online ad revenue. The reality, of course, is more complicated, and demonstrates why the Poynter model offers no easy cure for the ills that plague American journalism, even at the newspaper it was created to...

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