Congressional Quarterly – Nelson Poynter

Poynter was born into a newspaper family. At nine years of age, Nelson’s father purchased the St. Petersburg Times and moved the family to Florida. Years later, after earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics from Indiana University and Yale University, Poynter pursued a career in journalism. “There never was any question what my career would be. Journalism was in my blood from childhood.”

Together with his wife Henrietta, Poynter founded Congressional Quarterly in 1945 upon the premise that Americans should readily understand the real-life implications of their government. Poynter planned to achieve his goal by providing local newspapers around the country with in-depth information about congressional activity, which in turn could be used by newspapers to inform their reporting and educate their readers. He summed up the reasons for founding CQ, saying “The federal government will never set up an adequate agency to check on itself, and a foundation is too timid for that. So it had to be a private enterprise beholden to its clients.”