Sir Ernest John Pickstone Benn, 2nd Baronet, CBE (25 June 1875 – 17 January 1954) was a British publisher, writer and political publicist. His father, John Benn, was a Liberal politician, who had been made a baronet in 1914. He was brother of the Liberal and later Labour politician William Wedgwood Benn, and an uncle of the Labour politician Tony Benn.

Ernest John Pickstone Benn was born on 28 June 1875 at Oxted in Surrey, the eldest son of John William Benn and Elizabeth (née Pickstone). His father was a furniture designer.

Ernest was educated at the Middle Class School of London, a fee-paying day school in Cowper Street in the London Borough of Islington. From about April 1889 Ernest Benn and his younger brother lived for eighteen months with a family in Paris, in an exchange arrangement between the two families, involving two French girls from the Parisian family.

After returning from Paris, aged sixteen, Benn attempted to pass the London matriculation examination at the Cowper Street school, but he failed in three of the required five subjects. In December 1891 he started work in his father's office as the junior office boy, supervised by the senior office boy. After a year Benn was put into the design studio as an apprentice, his father entertaining the hope that his son "might develop into a draughtsman and designer".

In the early 1890s Benn's father stood as a parliamentary candidate, and Ernest, in addition to his regular office work, assisted with his political campaign. Benn's father, in his furniture design business, had established a trade journal in 1880 called The Cabinet Maker and Art Furnisher, an illustrated monthly publication dealing with the artistic and technical aspects of furniture, published by the family company Benn Brothers Ltd. In about 1894 Ernest Benn was appointed managing director of The Cabinet Maker and went on the road selling advertisement space, in which capacity he "worked hard and happily" until 1900.

In December 1899 the firm of Hazell, Watson and Viney, who owned and published The Hardware Trade Journal, offered to sell the monthly publication to Benn's father. John Benn "saw an opportunity to allow his son to develop on his own account" and encouraged and assisted his son to purchase The Hardware Trade Journal, to be managed along with The Cabinet Maker. In order to purchase The Hardware Trade Journal Ernest Benn joined with F. J. Francis, an experienced trade journal sub-editor, to form a company and issue a prospectus to secure the required capital via one pound shares. Hazell, Watson and Viney accepted a proposition to receive the purchase price of £1,500 in shares (to be paid out within seven years), but the prospectus was initially met with little response. John Benn then offered to subscribe 500 shares, if it could be matched by an equal amount or more from other investors. Francis was able to take advantage of his contacts in the retail ironmongery trade and was eventually able to secure a thousand shares to enable the sale to go through. As Ernest Benn later wrote, the added responsibility "marked the end of my period of apprenticeship as a publisher and the beginning of my real life's work".

The first issue of The Hardware Trade Journal, under its new management, was produced in March 1900, with Francis as editor and Benn as publisher and manager, working from offices in Finsbury Square in central London. It had been decided to publish the journal on a weekly basis. Benn later described the years 1900 to 1907 as "the hardest years of my life". Francis died in about 1902 ("his end being unquestionably hastened by the strain of that period"), after which Benn took on the additional role as editor.

Ernest Benn and Gwendoline Dorothy Andrews were married on 3 January 1903 at the parish church at Edgbaston, a suburb of Birmingham in the West Midlands.