Virginian-Pilot business reporter Benita Newton dies

Benita D. Newton, a business reporter for The Virginian-Pilot, died July 26 after collapsing at work. She was 25. The cause of death has not been determined. It was the second death in three weeks among The Virginian-Pilot's business news staff, which had six reporters. Michael Davis, an award-winning writer, died July 5 of cancer. He was 39.

The Pilot's business editor, Bill Choyke, said Newton collapsed shortly after the staff had just completed a weekly meeting in the early afternoon of Tuesday, July 26 - that included details for a planned memorial reception for Davis on Aug. 4.

"She was a wonderful person, a rising star as a reporter and a tireless worker," Choyke said. "She will be missed not only by her colleagues - but by all her came in contact with her. Benita touched quite a few
folks in the 14 months she was here."

Newton covered small businesses and nonprofit organizations and had joined The Pilot in June of 2004. Before that, she had served a year-long internship at the St. Petersburg Times.

She was from Alabama and had earned her undergraduate degree and a masters in business administration from the University of Alabama.

While in school, she worked for newspapers in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Ala., and served for more than two years as a volunteer instructor with West Alabama AIDS Outreach, according to an article in The Pilot. She spent a summer in New York City, interning at Newsweek magazine.

"She was this really sweet, quiet young person who was seeking something, and I get the sense recently that she had found it," Allan Sloan, Newsweek's Wall Street editor, was quoted as saying in the article. Sloan said the magazine has had interns who say they want to write about business just to get a foot in the door — but Newton wasn't one of them, and he was thrilled to see her pursue business journalism.

"She was getting a feel for it," Sloan said of her summer at the magazine. "She picked up the business writing bug."

Choyke, who's also a member of the SABEW board, said Newton was proud of a Page 1 profile she had written about Adrienne Ashby, a legal aid attorney who helped topple a finance company known for predatory lending.

After the death, Ashby wrote a note of condolence that said: "In the day that we spent together when she interviewed me, I found her to be an extremely warm and bright young reporter. We bonded immediately. She instinctively knew the right questions to ask, and showed that she cared about me as a person and about my clients. Y'all probably don't know this, but after meeting one of my clients who lives in a nursing home, and hearing that he had no family to come visit him, she sent him a huge basket of goodies around the Christmas holidays."

Deputy managing editor Alecia Swasy said Newton was "one of the best young business journalists I've ever met " and remembered offering her a job 20 minutes after her day of interviews had ended.

"I knew as soon as she walked in the door, she was one of those people who was going to knock your socks off," Swasy said.

Newton was a SABEW Chair Scholarship winner in 2003 while interning in St. Petersburg. She also was one of four SABEW representatives who attended the Historically Black Colleges Communications conference in Baton Rouge in February 2005. She spoke at a session on careers in business journalism.

“She was a committed and enthusiastic about enlisting other minorities into business journalism,” said SABEW Chair Mary Steffens.

“This is indeed sad news.”

By Charles Crumpley