James Edmund Scripps

Background

Scripps was born in 1835 in London to James Mogg Scripps and Ellen Mary (Saunders) Scripps. His father was a bookbinder who came to America in 1844 with six motherless children. Scripps grew up on a Rushville, Illinois, farm.

Career

Securing employment at the Chicago Tribune in 1857, moved to Detroit in 1859 and in 1862 became manager of the Detroit Tribune and also became at length part owner and manager of the Detroit Daily Advertiser. When the Advertiser"s premises burned in 1873, took his $20,000 insurance money and with it started his own newspaper. decided to tap the growing literate class of working men and women by launching a newspaper, The Evening News (later, The Detroit News). Running with an idea new for its time, he filled the paper with inexpensive advertising and instructed his reporters to write "like people talk." His competitors called the News "a cheap rag" and labeled his reporters "pirates," but Detroiters loved lieutenant

With his younger half-brother, East.W., James later had an interest in newspapers located in Cleveland, Saint Louis, Cincinnati and Chicago.

After a lengthy European acquisition tour, James aided prominently in founding the Detroit Museum of Art (later, the Detroit Institute of Arts), in 1889 presenting it with a collection of old masters costing $75,000 (in 1889 dollars), among the first major accessions of early paintings for any American museum. In 1900, wrote a letter for the Detroit Century Box time capsule. died in 1906 and is buried in Detroit"s Woodmere Cemetery.

Back in Detroit, James’ eldest daughter, Ellen Warren (1863–1948), married George Gough Booth, who subsequently became the publisher of the Evening News Association and independently founded Michigan’s Booth Newspapers chain (acquired by SI Newhouse"s Advance Publications in 1976). Together, George and “Nellie” also founded the world-renowned Cranbrook Educational Community in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Memorials of the Family (1891) A genealogical history of the Family and its various alliances (Detroit: privately printed, 1903).

Achievements

• James"s sister and one-time partner, Ellen Browning Scripps, was the founding donor of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography located in Louisiana Jolla, California and was the founder of Scripps College, located in Claremont.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Genealogical History of the Scripps Family and Its Various Alliances(Hardback) - 2015 Edition

    (New)

  • Memorials of the Scripps family microform : a centennial tribute