James Edmund Scripps (March 19, 1835 – May 28, 1906) was an American newspaper publisher and philanthropist.

Scripps was born in 1835 in London to James Mogg Scripps and Ellen Mary (Saunders) Scripps. His father was a bookbinder. After the death of Ellen Mary, his father immigrated to America in 1844 with their six motherless children. There he acquired land, and the boy Scripps grew up on a Rushville, Illinois, farm.

By his early 20s, Scripps was working at the Chicago Tribune in 1857.

He moved to Detroit in 1859, where he again worked in the newspaper business. By 1862 he had become manager of the Detroit Tribune, and he later became part owner and manager of the Detroit Daily Advertiser.

When the Advertiser's premises burned in 1873, Scripps took his $20,000 insurance money and with it started his own newspaper. Scripps 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 it.

Scripps later had an interest in E. W. Scripps Company with his younger half-brother, E. W. Scripps. They controlled newspapers located in Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Chicago.

After a lengthy European acquisition tour, Scripps aided prominently in founding the Detroit Museum of Art (later, the Detroit Institute of Arts). In 1889 he presented it with a collection of old masters, such as Cima da Conegliano's Madonna and Child, costing $75,000 (in 1889 dollars). This was among the first major accessions of early paintings for any American museum. A catalogue of the collection was published in 1889 and has been digitized by the Research Library & Archives of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

In 1900, Scripps wrote a letter for the Detroit Century Box time capsule.