Lee Hills; Retired Chairman of Knight-Ridder Newspaper Chain

Lee Hills, 93, former chairman of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain who led the Miami Herald to its first Pulitzer Prize. Hills started in newspapers at the age of 14, in a summer job that entailed running a Linotype machine, writing a society column and sweeping out the offices of a weekly in Price, Utah. After some courses at Brigham Young University and the University of Missouri, he earned a law degree from Oklahoma City University when he was 29 and worked as a reporter for the Oklahoma News. A few years later he was the editor. In 1942, he was hired by John S. Knight to be city editor of the Miami Herald, winning a promotion to managing editor within four months. He quickly strengthened the newsroom, acquiring for editors the authority to stop the presses for a breaking story. When newsprint was sharply rationed during World War II, he shrank the paper by 12 daily pages and by 36 on Sundays, but he maximized war coverage for readers by cutting display advertising. He offered regular advertisers free space on a back page to summarize their products. Although it was a costly move, the Herald’s readership rose, eventually surpassing that of the rival Miami News, which did not adjust its news-to-advertising ratio during the newsprint shortage. (The News, which later entered a joint operating agreement with the Herald, folded in 1988.) Hills led the Herald to the first of its 16 Pulitzers in 1951 in a “Know Your Neighbor” series about south Florida mobsters that included pictures of their mansions, limousines and yachts. He helped forge the agreement that merged Knight Newspapers with Ridder Publications in 1974 and became Knight-Ridder’s first chairman and chief executive officer. He retired in 1981. On Thursday at a Miami hospital after a long illness.