Frank Batten Jr. breaks with the past and pursues a new calling

NORFOLK

The decision to put Landmark Communications Inc. up for sale this year thrust the diversified media company into a position its chairman shrinks from himself: directly in the spotlight.

It’s been a decade since Frank Batten Jr. succeeded his fabled father as chairman of Landmark, whose holdings now include The Weather Channel; Dominion Enterprises, a Norfolk-based information and marketing services company; The Virginian-Pilot and dozens of smaller papers; two television stations; and various technology businesses.

Since then, Batten has earned a reputation as a savvy entrepreneur, community-minded, scrupulous, exacting in his standards and yet willing to delegate wide latitude to trusted intimates.

Much like his father.

But inside and outside his company, he is seen as less passionate about newspapers, more open to risk and wise to the ways of technology. More deeply religious. More withdrawn.

“He struck me as a completely guileless person,” said Walter Rugaber, former publisher of The Roanoke Times, which is owned by Landmark. “He pretty much tended to say what was on his mind, almost to a fault. And yet he was and is a very private person. You have that sort of dichotomy there that’s very hard to figure out.”

Batten, who will turn 50 in July, declined a face-to-face interview, though his office sits one floor above the newsroom in The Pilot’s building in Norfolk. He agreed to answer questions by e-mail, responding to six of 40 that were submitted. The subjects he did not address included his personal life, his professional achievements and disappointments, and the reason for the company breakup.

Batten did say that “there has been a tremendous amount of interest in our businesses.” The Wall Street Journal reported late last month that two suitors – Time Warner and a partnership led by General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal – were leading contenders for The Weather Channel, Landmark’s most lucrative property. The latest round of bids were due May 23, according to the Journal, and were expected to come in between $3 billion and $4 billion.

Amplifying his previous comment that Landmark would steer clear of “inappropriate buyers,” Batten also wrote: “We expect to sell our newspapers to companies whose publishing executives have a track record of successfully serving the needs of readers, advertisers, employees and local communities.”

Frank Batten Sr., who is 81, cast a huge imprint on The Pilot and the region. He served as The Pilot’s publisher for nearly a quarter-century, compared with four years for his son. His was a regular presence in the newspaper’s composing room and newsroom ; Frank Jr., in contrast, keeps a low profile and has not appeared at The Pilot’s rank-and-file meetings about the sale. Batten Sr. drew both gratitude and wrath for aligning The Pilot against the “massive resistance” movement, which sought to block school integration in the late 1950s. Those editorials won a Pulitzer Prize. Words from Batten’s vision of the newspaper’s mission still grace The Pilot daily.

The son’s most public success, attesting to his technological savvy, was his investment a decade ago in a little-known software company, Red Hat. He made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Batten wanted Landmark to invest, too, but his father didn’t chance it. Father said of his son later: “Frank has a Red Hat, and I have a red face.”

Frank Batten Sr., the nephew of Landmark’s founder, Samuel L. Slover, acquired dozens of small and medium-size newspapers over the years. His son values newspapers, too, but it’s not at his father’s level of passion, said Louis Ryan, who retired in 1999 as Landmark’s executive vice president and general counsel.

“If I say, 'Tiger Woods loves golf more than you do,’ that wouldn’t mean you don’t like golf,” Ryan said. “I don’t think you could find anybody in the industry who loved newspapers as much as Frank Batten Sr. Frank Batten Jr. likes newspapers, but he doesn’t have ink in his veins.”

The announcement five months ago to sell Landmark – a $2 billion private company in which the younger Batten has majority voting power – stoked speculation that the son wanted finally to forge his own path as he enters his 50s. While not disclosing the reason then, Batten said it was not tied to personal motives.

Rugaber wonders. “I never really felt he enjoyed the newspaper business,” he said. “Frank Jr. didn’t like people being mad all the time, and that’s what you get when you’re a newspaper publisher.”

Others suggest that the decision was pure business. Batten, they say, might have done on a large scale what he’s practiced for years: Probing the terrain with an analytical mind and making the most sensible choice, putting emotions aside.

“Keeping the business intact may be the dumbest thing that anybody can do,” said Frank Daniels Jr., a retired publisher of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., and former member of Landmark’s board. “Businesses, like everything else, have a life span. The industry in general has been in decline. I think it’s going to take a totally fresh look at how you do business.”

Batten’s legacy, Daniels predicted, will be “selling the company. That’s the hardest decision of all.”

From early on, friends and colleagues say, Frank Batten Jr. was sober-minded and self- effacing, never one to call attention to himself – or the family name.

“He’s the kind of guy that you really trust with everything; he’s always been that way,” said former U.S. District Judge Walter D. Kelley Jr., who knew Batten growing up in Norfolk and later served with him on Old Dominion University ’s Board of Visitors. “While the rest of us were running around, seeing how much we could piss off our parents, Frank was always a solid, steady guy.” He received an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in 1980 and an MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School in 1984.

“Frank may have been the most unassuming person that I met during my entire time at Darden,” said classmate James Olver, now assistant business dean at the College of William and Mary. “I had no idea who he was until probably the second year.”

T. Kent Smith, another U.Va. alumnus who is CEO of Revolution Technologies in Atlanta, said: “There was a purpose about Frank, a stronger purpose than you’d see in a lot of my classmates. Frank has very little charisma; he’s dull as dishwater. But when he spoke in class, you listened to what he had to say.”

Like his father, Batten began his career as an ad salesman and reporter. “I wouldn’t say that he was a great reporter or a great writer, but he was very solid and did good work,” said Rich Martin, the city editor at the time at The Roanoke Times, Batten’s first stop. “Night cops, weekend duty – he did everything without complaint.”

After two years in business school came an 18-month reporting stint with The Associated Press in London. Batten moved in 1986 to Elizabethtown, Ky., where he served as general manager, and then publisher, of The News-Enterprise, one of Landmark’s community newspapers.

Lamonte Hornback, a Realtor in Elizabethtown, recalled him as “very reserved” and “quite astute.” Batten, he said, once bought a Nissan with no air conditioning, presumably to show his staff that he didn’t throw money away.

“I just plain liked him,” Hornback said. “He needs to get back here and visit us sometime.”

Batten returned to Norfolk in 1990, continuing his climb up Landmark’s ladder. He was president and publisher of The Pilot from 1991 to 1995, succeeded his father as chairman of Landmark in 1998, and added the title of chief executive officer in 2001.

His father, who launched The Weather Channel in 1982, credited his only son with a significant expansion when Batten Jr. was executive vice president of Landmark, focusing on new technologies, in the late ’90s.

“He thought we should make a major commitment to develop weather.com, and do it promptly while we had a large headstart in the weather venue,” Batten Sr. wrote in his book about the channel. Last year, Advertising Age, a trade publication, pegged the reach of weather.com at No. 8, sitting between YouTube and CNN, with nearly 38 million visitors.

Batten’s prescient dip into Red Hat, an obscure open-source software company in North Carolina, brought millions of a different sort. He became its largest shareholder and member of a three-man board. An initial $3 million investment at one point was worth $2.5 billion.

“He didn’t micromanage,” said Bob Young, then chairman of Red Hat. “He was just a very helpful, big-picture guy.” Similarly, at Landmark, Batten has been “more interested in where we can go for the next big thing” than in overseeing day-to-day business, Ryan said.

In his e-mail, Batten touted recent innovations, such as PilotOnline.com and Link, a free daily aimed at young adults, assigning the credit to other Landmark executives. “We now reach through our total print and online products nearly 80 percent of this market every week,” he wrote. “That is a wonderful foundation for the future.”

Batten’s finest accomplishment, said Ryan, may be that “under his leadership, Landmark newspapers are in better shape than many others.”

With the growth of the Internet and other competition, newspapers nationwide have struggled with diminishing profits for several years, leading to layoffs and buyouts. Among Landmark newspapers, the Greensboro, N.C., paper laid off 41 workers last year. Neither The Pilot nor The Roanoke Times has suffered layoffs, though both offered early retirement packages last year.

Through trusts, Batten, who lives in a waterfront Norfolk home valued at $3.5 million, owns at least 5.1 percent of the company, according to the most recent records related to Landmark’s television stations on file with the Federal Communications Commission. Virginia Business last estimated his net worth at $700 million in 2006.

Outside the office, when Batten lets down his guard, another persona emerges: warm, generous, even funny. “He’s got a very keen, but subtle, sense of humor,” said Shep Miller, a former neighbor in Larchmont. “He’s not a guy to tell a joke, but he’ll say something offhand, and then the wit hits you.”

John Padgett, another former neighbor, also knows Batten from Fleet Park Little League, where their sons play baseball. “Whatever mundane task a coach asked him to help out with, he was there,” Padgett said. “He always took his turn in the concession stand or at the fry machine. When we had field maintenance day, he was there to help.”

At every step in his career, colleagues remember him as a weekly churchgoer. Batten’s family attends Tabernacle Church of Norfolk; his two sons go to Norfolk Christian Schools.

Batten leads a Sunday night Bible study group, said Tabernacle’s senior pastor, Kenny Bryant, and he meets with Bryant at least quarterly to help him think strategically about the church’s mission.

“A lot of business guys are very opinionated,” Bryant said. “They want you to take their advice and go with it, and they’re offended if you don’t. Frank is not that way. He tries to offer counsel, but he doesn’t demand that you do it his way.”

Unlike his parents, who have donated hundreds of millions of dollars primarily to educational institutions, including U.Va. and ODU, Batten and his wife, Aimee, have primarily funded Christian causes from their own private foundation.

According to Internal Revenue Service documents, their foundation gave $45 million from 2001 to 2006. Locally, Norfolk Christian and Tabernacle were major recipients. Outside the area, the Battens during that time donated $13 million to Wycliffe Bible Translators, which seeks to translate the Bible into every language on Earth, and $2 million to Focus on the Family, an evangelical group led by James Dobson, a prominent Christian conservative.

Bob Creson, the president of Wycliffe, declined through a spokeswoman to talk about Batten.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington-based law firm that advocates for free religious expression worldwide, has received more than $550,000 from Frank and Aimee Batten, according to the IRS forms. “He’s one of the few who will put down a substantial amount of money to defend the religious freedom of people he disagrees with,” said Becket’s president, Kevin J. “Seamus” Hasson.

Hasson described his discussions with Batten as profound yet unpretentious – “just a couple of guys talking about how we’re going to change the world.” Batten, he said, “has never, ever asked for something to be named for him or for any public acknowledgment. He just wanted to see the work get done quietly.”

Batten did not answer questions about the role of religion in his life. The dissolution of Landmark has inspired conjecture that he might make Christianity the centerpiece of his professional pursuits. Young, the former chairman of Red Hat, who sees Batten as a kindred spirit, doesn’t believe so.

“Philanthropy is very much a secondary way to make the world a better place,” he said. “Our primary contribution is building valuable companies that make consumers’ lives better.”

Philip Walzer, (757) 222-3864, phil.walzer@pilotonline.com