‘Grace and dignity’: Beloved longtime Sacramento Bee journalist Janet Vitt dies at 69
.jpg "Janet Vitt, a journalist and editor who worked for The Sacramento Bee for nearly 30 years, died Wednesday. She steered entertainment coverage and was instrumental in the paper’s internship program.")
Retired Sacramento Bee journalist Janet Vitt, a beloved bon vivant who spent nearly three decades as a reporter and editor for the newspaper, died this week. She was 69.
“She had a great intellect, rock-solid integrity and all of it filtered through a superb grace,” said Ellie Shaw, a former editor at The Bee and close family friend.
Vitt joined The Bee in 1987 as a reporter on the newspaper’s city desk. For the better part of the 2010s, she served as deputy features editor and editor of its Ticket section, shaping the paper’s entertainment coverage.
“Janet was not your stereotypical newsperson,” said Marjie Lundstrom, a former Bee reporter and editor who worked with Vitt for years. “She was very moored, spiritually. She added that dimension in the newsroom that you don’t often see.”
Lundstrom said Vitt had no problem performing “thankless jobs,” like setting reporters’ schedules.
“She did it with so much grace and dignity,” Lundstrom said. “But she was tough. If she was going around with the holiday schedules, you wanted to dive under your desk.”
Vitt, who left The Bee in 2017, passed away Wednesday evening at her home in Land Park. She died of gastric cancer about one year after diagnosis, Shaw said.
It was Vitt’s second battle with cancer, following a breast cancer diagnosis in the 1990s.
Vitt was preceded in death by her husband, Rick Abrams, also a Bee reporter, who died of melanoma in 1997.
“It was just the most heartbreaking thing the newsroom experienced,” Lundstrom said of Abrams’ death, which came as Vitt continued to battle breast cancer. Most of the Bee staff attended Abrams’ funeral, Lundstrom said.
“She felt really loved and supported by The Bee.”
Vitt was “incredibly supportive” herself, and universally beloved by her reporters, Lundstrom said. She would host luncheons for summer interns, Shaw said, even personally cooking meals for them.
“She’s the only person I ever worked with, in newsrooms throughout the country, who was never dissed behind her back,” Shaw said. “Janet, in all my memory, I never heard anybody say a bad word about her.”
A native of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Vitt graduated from the University of Oklahoma, where she wrote for the Oklahoma Daily.
“Janet was an editor I absolutely respected,” said Leigh Grogan, another former Bee journalist, who spent more than two decades working with Vitt, including years on the features desk. “She was at the top of her game. She was terrific at coaxing great stories out of the writers in our department. ... You just don’t find someone like Janet.”
Vitt and Grogan met a few years earlier at the now-shuttered Dallas Times Herald, in 1983. Both headed west to California’s capital city later that decade.
As the years went on, they would bond over loss and pain.
“We both went through some health issues together, and we often met outside The Bee to — not really commiserate, but to boost one another’s spirits.”
In 2013, Vitt had a medical emergency involving blood flowing into her lungs. Her heart stopped during the course of a lung biopsy, Shaw recalled.
“It took them 26 minutes to start her heart. That’s how tough she is.”
Shaw said that when Vitt’s oncologist sent her into hospice care earlier this month, the doctor “burst into tears.”
An avid reader, traveler and wine enthusiast, Vitt was also deeply involved with St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church, serving on its parish council and on the committee for its annual gala.
Vitt also helped blaze some trails during a transformative time in journalism.
“Janet was so incredibly supportive,” said Lundstrom, recalling her own transition from reporter to editor, in which she became Vitt’s boss. “There weren’t, at the time, many women yet in management. She went on to have many female bosses after that.”
Vitt is survived by her brother, Michael Vitt, and sister-in-law Maureen McCarthy; and sisters Cindy Vitt-Murphy and Elaine Vitt.
Funeral arrangements are pending, Shaw said.
This story was originally published October 28, 2022 at 10:00 AM.
