Hills, Lee (28 May 1906-3 Feb. 2000), journalist and newspaper executive, was born on a farm near Granville, North Dakota, the son of Lewis Amos Hills(a former farmer who later moved to Utah and became a salesman) and Lulu Mae Loomis. The family moved to Utah when he was three. After a chicken-raising venture failed, his father became a traveling insurance salesman. Lee's mother died when he was eleven, which caused him and his brothers to often be left on their own.

At fourteen Hills took his first newspaper job, earning $6 a week for sweeping the floors, helping at the press, and selling ads for the weekly News Advocate of Price, Utah. By twenty he had become its editor but had also declined an opportunity to buy the paper, preferring to continue his education. After studying at Brigham Young University (1924-1925) and the University of Missouri School of Journalism (1927-1929), he completed his LL.B. degree in 1934 at the Oklahoma City University School of Law, then known as the Oklahoma City School of Law, taking classes at night. During the days, he worked as a reporter first for the Oklahoma City Times and then for the Oklahoma News, which was owned by the Scripps Howard newspaper chain. He covered local politics and the courts (which in those colorful days meant everything from the governor William Henry David "Alfalfa Bill" Murray's "Toll-Bridge War" against Texas to the kidnapping trial of Machine Gun Kelly). In 1933 he married Leona Haas, the first of his three wives; the couple had one son and divorced in 1944.

Scripps Howard executives were soon deploying Hills wherever their papers needed a fresh eye or a firm hand: to the Cleveland Press in 1935, to the Indianapolis Times in 1936, back to Oklahoma in 1938, to the Memphis Press-Scimitar in 1939, and back to Cleveland in 1940. Two years later, Hills left Scripps Howard when John S. Knight, who with his brother, James L. Knight, owned a small string of newspapers, offered Hills the city editorship of the Miami Herald. Hills would remain with the Knight Newspaper group for nearly forty years, nurturing its reputation for aggressive and independent reporting, helping to guide its expansion, and eventually becoming chairman of Knight Newspapers. Promoted to managing editor within four months of his arrival in Miami in 1942 and to executive editor in 1951, Hills always demanded reporting that held to the highest standards, which meant not just accuracy, fairness, objectivity, and readability, but also absolute autonomy for newsroom editors, staunch resistance to commercial pressures, and a commitment to the public good. In 1943, during his second year at the Herald, wartime rationing brought on a temporary but severe paper shortage. Hills chose to make drastic cuts in the advertising pages and to impose circulation limits in order to cram in as much war news and local reporting as possible. When the paper crunch eased, both circulation and advertising bounced back vigorously, while its rival, the Miami News, which had made the opposite choice, saw its numbers decline.

Asked in 1951 to turn his attention to the Detroit Free Press but loath to leave the Herald, Hills worked out an unusual arrangement: he became the executive editor of both papers at the same time. For most of the next thirty years he held posts as editor or publisher in both Detroit and Miami and shuttled often between the two cities. (His second wife, Eileen Whitman Bryne, whom he married in 1948, died suddenly in their Miami home in 1961 during one of his trips to Detroit.) Beginning in 1959 he also served successively as executive editor, vice president, and president of Knight Newspapers, which eventually owned sixteen daily papers in seven states.

Under Hills's leadership the Miami Herald won its first Pulitzer Prize, the 1951 gold medal for public service, for a series on organized crime in southern Florida that Hills said had been rooted in his realization that the mob went south for the winter too. Even with his heavy executive duties he found time to report a complicated and sensitive Detroit story, earning the Pulitzer for local reporting in his own name in 1956 for his "aggressive, resourceful and comprehensive" coverage of the United Auto Workers' negotiations with Ford and General Motors.

In 1963 Hills married Argentina "Tina" Schifano Ramos, the publisher of El Mundo in Puerto Rico, who, like him, was active in the Inter-American Press Association and who shared his interest in Latin American affairs.

In 1974, five years after Knight Newspapers was taken public, Hills helped to engineer its merger with Ridder Publications, which owned or had an interest in nineteen newspapers in eleven states. Hills was named the first chairman and chief executive officer of the new company, Knight Ridder, which at the time had the largest combined circulation in the country and which generally continued to enjoy a reputation for journalistic excellence. Some observers, however, came to feel that in the changing economic climate the traditional Ridder emphasis on the bottom line was outweighing Knight values. The company was sold to McClatchy in 2006.

An active philanthropist in his own right, with a particular interest in the arts, Hills was also influential in persuading John Knight to expand the mission and funding of the small foundation his family had begun in 1940 to provide college scholarships to local students. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, of which Hills served as chairman and trustee, has been deeply involved in initiatives to advance and improve journalism, as well as support a range of other educational, cultural, and civic endeavors.

Upon his retirement in 1981, Hills became Knight Ridder's editorial chairman emeritus. In 1995 the University of Missouri School of Journalism recognized his contributions to the profession by dedicating Lee Hills Hall. At the same time, Lee and Tina Hills established the Lee Hills Chair in Free-Press Studies to advance the understanding of the value of free expression to democratic societies. The emphasis of good journalism, Hills said at the time, "should be on serving citizens. . . People have to know what is going on if they want to govern themselves." (http://www.journalism.missouri.edu/faculty/stuart-loory.html). Hills died in Miami Beach.

Aspects of Hills's life and career are described in Nixon Smiley, Knights of the Fourth Estate: The Story of the Miami Herald (1974), for which Hills is credited as a source, and Davis Merritt, Knightfall: Knight Ridder and How the Erosion of Newspaper Journalism is Putting Democracy at Risk (2005). Also informative are the obituaries of Hills published in the Miami Herald on 4 February 2000 and the New York Times on 5 February 2000. John S. Knight's papers, many of which concern Knight Newspapers, Knight Ridder, and the Knight Foundation, are held by the archives of the University of Akron in Ohio.