On the occasion of Poynter’s 50th anniversary, I am pleased to reveal, for the first time ever, the secret history of the institute’s enduring logo.

When Nelson Poynter created a nonprofit school to inherit his newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, he named it the Modern Media Institute. That was a pretty good name and an even better abbreviation: MMI. On a T-shirt, a newsroom wag created a funny logo: Two em dashes followed by an eyeball. MMI.

No one knew exactly what the school would teach. Mr. Poynter died suddenly in 1978 and, the following year, I was asked to migrate from the Times newsroom to a tiny converted bank building (once a business run by three resourceful women). That building now stands empty (though I am happy to report that its next-door neighbor, the Emerald Bar, stands tall).

In spite of that signature bow tie, Mr. Poynter was a notoriously modest man and would not have wanted his name on the school. But he was dead, and we gave him the credit he deserved. Thus was born The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

There was a problem: MMI came humming from the lips. The new name took a three-character abbreviation and replaced it with a 38-character string of abstractions.

I was the first full-time faculty member at the school. The second was Dr. Mario Garcia, a charismatic Cuban immigrant who began as a copy editor and moved to college teaching. I will profess, without fear of contradiction, that in the following half-century, Mario became the world’s most creative and influential news designer. He has not quite reached 1,000 product designs, but I bet he will. His most famous involved the introduction of photography and color to the once vertically gray Wall Street Journal.

Mario was assigned to create a logo that would go with our new name.

Here it is:

It was a sturdy ball and staff, signifying the letters P and I, although I always thought the round part of the P looked a little like that glass vessel used to boil stuff in science labs. But it stood strong for at least a decade, right up to the new millennium and the early manifestations of the digital age.

At that point, the higher-ups thought that the joint needed a more modern logo, one that suggested a future with new technologies and new media. With Mario long gone, they turned to a sophisticated marketing firm, which, as I remember, came in, took a look at the place, chatted with the staff and created a prototype.

The day of their presentation is seared in my memory. Two men in suits, the boss and the designer, shared images of the logo they had created. It was quite stylish, I thought, and set Poynter in the light of a new media age.

I don’t have an image to share, but I remember well that it comprised three elements: The at sign (@), and the letters P and I. They were woven into a single symbol, and it was possible to see several uses.

I raised my hand — reluctantly, since there were smiles on most faces.

I politely praised the work that had gone into this logo, and then lowered the boom: “You have created a perfect logo for our main competitor: The American Press Institute. Known as API.”

@ P I.

If there had been music in the room, it would’ve sounded like the descending trombone after a contestant scores a ZONK on “Let’s Make a Deal”: wah, wah, wahhh.

By this time, I had wonderful experiences with colleagues in visual journalism — not just Mario, but also a world expert on typography (Roger Black), and another on color (Pegie Stark), not to mention a leader in photojournalism (Kenny Irby). I could not do what they do, but after countless conversations, I learned to speak design without an accent.

Stand with Poynter

As we mark Poynter’s 50th year, this Giving Tuesday is a moment to invest in the work that sustains journalism. If Poynter’s reporting, training or programs have supported you this year, or in the past 50 years, consider making a gift before Dec. 31. Your support strengthens the newsroom community we serve.

I value Poynter, and I’m giving back today.

In a meeting with frustrated colleagues, still looking for a logo, I applied a strategy I learned in graduate school while studying the Middle Ages:  Occam’s razor, which suggests the best solution is the simplest one.

The initials PI were no longer in play — blocked out by API and sounding like the mathematical symbol and formula Pi r squared (which reminds me of the joke: Pie are not square; pie are round!).

The most important element would be the name itself in some new but classic typeface (possibly suggested by Roger Black). Poynter was the man’s name, with a strong emphasis on the first syllable; it suggested the words “pointer” — as in your index finger — and the dog breed “pointer,” which, I argued, has a nose for news. “Point” was a good word for journalism. Good stories had a point. And sharp reports pointed the reader in the right direction.

But what about a hint of a digital future? It came in the form of another point, a typographical one, known in America as a period, and in Britain as a full stop. It signaled the end of a complete thought: like this one.

Just as the @ sign became essential to digital punctuation, so did the period, but with a name change known as the dot. As in dot com or dot edu or dot org, or a thousand other uses.

Thus, the invention could be interpreted as looking in two directions, the past and the strongest journalistic traditions and practices. The first: Poynter period, full stop, drop the mic, stick the landing. Poynter as a complete sentence.

Or you could read it as Poynter dot, with more to come, an exciting digital future ahead of us.

Look, I said, we are old-fashioned and modern at the same time, kind of like Camden Yards.

I have no objections to a new logo as the institute looks toward its second half-century. So far, we have resisted the urge to play with the period, turning it into one of a hundred round comic imogees. If Poynter were to create something new, I would suggest that we bypass the design robots of artificial intelligence and return to a much more powerful force: the creative brain and visionary eye of Mario Garcia.

He remains the best. Period.