Local angles: Emerald Isle, N.C.; Jacksonville, N.C.; Rockville, Md.

$105,000 gift endows summer internships at community newspapers for UNC students

By ZACH HOSKINS
School of Journalism and Mass Communication

CHAPEL HILL -- Mary Harlan Batten of Emerald Isle has given $105,000 to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication to fund student summer internships at community newspapers around the state.

Each year, one school student will receive the Jim Batten Community Newspaper Internship, named in memory of Mary Batten’s late husband. The award provides a $5,000 stipend to help pay for the student’s expenses during the internship.

"I think it’s a really good way for the school, as a result of the Batten family’s gift, to give something back to North Carolina community newspapers," said Jay Eubank, the school’s director of career services in the school. Eubank said the award would allow students to intern at smaller community papers without having to worry if the papers could fund the internships’ costs.

Batten was born in 1917 in Wadesboro. He attended UNC-Chapel Hill, Davidson College and the University of Miami. A gunnery sergeant and engineer in the 8th Air Force in World War II, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross with Four Oak Leaf Clusters and the Air Medal. He flew 36 bombing missions, including two during the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

After working at the Hollywood Sun-Tattler and the Hialeah Home News (both in Florida) until 1952, Batten became sports editor of The Fayetteville Observer, where he titled his column "Batten the Breeze," a name he would later carry to other papers. He wrote and edited for several N.C. newspapers for more than 20 years. He also was a reporter and editor at papers in Dunn and Sanford before he joined The Daily News in Jacksonville in 1962 as a sports writer.

He became executive editor of The Daily News in 1966. Under his leadership, the paper expanded its circulation and took progressive editorial positions on issues such as civil rights, education and public health. Batten also directed the newspaper’s transition into offset-printing technology.

Batten was committed throughout his editorial career to the training and development of young journalists. Many reporters with whom he worked became prize-winning writers and broadcast journalists, in North Carolina and across the country.

For the last two decades of his life, Batten, who died in 2001, was better known as owner of Emerald Isle Realty, one of the largest real estate agencies on the N.C. coast. But even as a successful businessman, he remained committed to the health of small-town papers in his home state, counseling journalists who came to him for advice on starting their own weeklies.

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School contact: Zach Hoskins, assistant dean for communication, (919) 966-3323, zhoskins@email.unc.edu.
News Services contact: Mike McFarland, (919) 962-8593