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Frank Batten Sr., whose love of newspapers led him to found Landmark Communications, the media chain that owned the News & Record, died Thursday in Norfolk, Va.

Batten, who retired as Landmark chairman in 1998, was 82.

He is survived by his wife, Jane, three children, and countless friends and colleagues.

He was a son of privilege, the heir to a family fortune, a man whose life, in other hands, might have been measured in dollars and cents. Instead, Frank Batten forged a legacy not on what he made but what he created.

From errand boy he rose to publisher of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and its afternoon sister paper, then parlayed them into an adventuresome media company with global reach.

In 1964, Batten bought the Greensboro Daily News, The Greensboro Record and WFMY-TV. Three years later, he launched Landmark Communications, now known as Landmark Media Enterprises LLC.

“Mr. Batten was an extraordinary man who expected his newspapers to improve the local community,” said Robin Saul, president and publisher of the News & Record. “He was a leader in having us focus on understanding and serving our customers while providing an editorially and financially strong newspaper.

“He was an honest and sincere person who believed in developing all employees. He expected us to be actively engaged in our communities. His leadership was special and created the corporate culture we continue to operate in.”

The purchase of the Greensboro newspapers in 1964 brought howls of protest, from the city’s top business leaders to rank-and-file readers. They feared that Batten, from an office in Norfolk, would dictate the slate of editorials and what news would be covered in Greensboro.

“It never happened,” recalled Ken Baldwin, one of the first Norfolk executives that Batten dispatched to Greensboro. “Frank was a hands-off guy in that respect.”

Such worries were understandable. The newspapers had been locally owned since The Record began as the Greensboro Daily Record in 1890. The Daily News came along in 1909.

Before Batten bought them, the papers were owned by the Jeffress family of Greensboro. In addition to running both papers, E.B. Jeffress had served as Greensboro’s mayor and would have run for governor had he not suffered a stroke.

Jeffress was Greensboro’s equivalent of Samuel Slover, Batten’s uncle and surrogate father. While publishing the newspapers in Norfolk, Slover served a stint as mayor and was active in many civic endeavors, as his nephew Batten would be later.

“He was the biggest influence on my life,” Batten said of Slover decades later. “It was not so much his style but his values that influenced me. He had a lot of simple but very strong values — about truthfulness, the way you deal with people, being straightforward.”

That style served Batten well in Greensboro. He helped soothe local concerns about a stranger in their midst by promoting Bill Snider, who had been the Daily News’ associate editor, as editor of both papers.

Snider recalled that Carl Jeff­ress, who had succeeded his father as head of the newspapers, was under pressure from his family to sell the company. He had turned down several lucrative offers because he didn’t like the journalism standards of the would-be buyers.

But Jeffress was impressed when Frank Batten approached him, Snider said.

“He found that Batten was a man of integrity and intelligence and dedicated to responsible journalism,” Snider said. “And that was true. Frank Batten was one of the finest publishers I ever ran into during my career. He believed the essential importance of a free press, and he promoted good journalism.”

Irwin Smallwood, who was associate sports editor of the Daily News at the time, said that when the paper’s sale was announced, “The dread of the unknown was really overpowering until Frank Batten came and talked to us. He was extremely impressive. He couldn’t have been more reassuring. He put us all at ease, and we never worried again.”

Batten rented an apartment in what’s now the Hampshire on North Elm Street. He made speeches to local groups and met the city’s leaders and activists. He made clear his business and journalism philosophy.

To the Greensboro Kiwanis Club in 1965, he said a newspaper “should reflect the community — its interests, its successes and failures and its needs. If it ever loses touch with the community, it has failed in its mission.”

In a speech to the Greensboro United Way in late 1964, Batten said newspapers must be forever mindful of social conditions in the community.

“A healthy business climate cannot exist in a community where human needs go unmet,” he said. “How can a community flourish when its progress is strangled by wretchedness, apathy and despair?”

He later wrote a platform for his newspapers, presaging the mission statements embraced by corporate America years later. “Newspapers live entirely on the bounty of the public,” the document opened. “The ability of journalists to report and to comment is based upon a unique grant of freedom from the public. Thus our duty is clear: It is to serve the public with skill and character, and to exercise First Amendment freedoms with vigor and responsibility.”

The independence of Landmark papers “is not for sale,” he wrote. “There are no sacred cows. No territory of legitimate public interest is off limits to fair and competent report and comment.”

Batten concluded the credo by urging his papers to search “as hard for strengths and accomplishments as for weakness and failure. Rather than demoralize its community, the great newspaper will by honest and intelligent journalism inspire people to do better.”

Batten’s promise to keep a Norfolk slant out of the Daily News and The Record didn’t stop him from making changes in Greensboro. Batten sent Peter B. Bush, an executive with the Norfolk newspapers, to Greensboro to run the Daily News and The Record business operations. Landmark eventually traded WFMY-TV to another chain. Later, the station was bought by Gannett.

Dick Hendricks, a Landmark executive sent here from Norfolk in 1973 to help the newspaper adopt new technology and to begin preparations for a new building, said Batten had a site picked out in south Greensboro.

What happened next, in Hendricks’ view, showed Batten’s willingness to do what was best for the community, even if it wasn’t best from a business standpoint.

“We would have built outside the downtown if Jim Melvin hadn’t gone to Norfolk and talked Frank into staying downtown,” said Hendricks, referring to the city’s mayor at the time.

Melvin argued that downtown was suffering. Losing the newspapers to the suburbs would be devastating.

As a result, Landmark bought the site of the old King Cotton Hotel at East Market and South Davie streets downtown and built a structure that opened in late 1976.

Batten’s belief that Landmark properties should give something back to the community was carried out through the Landmark Foundation, which gives money to education, cultural and charitable causes.

Since 2000, the foundation has given more than $3.3 million in grants to organizations and projects in the Triad, including the United Arts Council, the Greensboro Children’s Museum, the YMCA, the Salvation Army, the United Ways of Greensboro and High Point, Action Greensboro and most of the colleges and universities.

Until its partial breakup in 2008, Batten’s Landmark Communications was one of the country’s largest privately held media companies.

The business’s marquee properties were The Weather Channel and Weather.com, since sold.

Its successor, Landmark Media Enterprises LLC, remains parent to nine daily newspapers and more than 100 nondaily newspapers and specialty publications; to TV stations in Las Vegas and Nashville, Tenn.; and to Dominion Enterprises, which produces a national chain of classified-ad publications and owns a large office building in downtown Norfolk.

At its height, the company employed more than 10,000 people throughout the United States and Europe, and annual revenues approached $2 billion.

“The thing I think I’m most proud of,” Batten said, “is developing what I think is a first-rate company that has high values and makes a contribution to all the communities we serve.”

In 1977, Batten — blessed with a fast-growing company, a loving family, long-standing friendships, a beautiful home and a private jet — learned he had cancer.

After two years of radiation treatments, he lost his larynx to surgery. Afterward, he was mute and breathed through a hole in his neck.

“The idea alone scared me stiff,” he wrote in The Virginian-Pilot a month after the operation. “The enforced silence has been the most difficult adjustment. ... What sustained me is an abiding conviction that I will learn to talk again.”

And so he did, devoting months to “taming and disciplining an ungoverned burp to shape it into a new voice.”

Private though he was, Batten’s recovery was remarkably public.

“The minute he was ready to get out of bed, he went into the office,” said Walter Rugaber, former editor of the Greensboro Daily News and past president of Landmark’s newspaper operations. “And really, right out there in front of everyone, he transformed himself from the initial stages of having lost his larynx to the point that a couple years later, as the chairman of AP, he’d get up and deliver speeches.”

Batten told readers the following June that he was proud of his new growl. “Already it represents one of the most exhilarating accomplishments of my life,” he wrote. “The truth is that I have gained more than I lost from the encounter with cancer.”

Outside Landmark, he donated a total of $160 million to the University of Virginia. He also set up a college scholarship program for deserving Virginia high school students.

Among all that, he remained a man who was not comfortable talking about himself and his accomplishments.

“I guess I’d like to be remembered as someone who did some worthwhile things, who left this community — and in fact, this nation ­— a better place,” he said in an early 2000 interview.

Then, he grimaced, and shook his head: “That’s really a platitude, isn’t it?”

Earl Swift of The Virginian-Pilot contributed to this story.