Among the reporters taking early retirement at the Strib this past week is Dane Smith, dean of Minnesota political reporters.

Doug Tice – an editor who is very rarely mistaken for a cliched liberal reporter – reminisces:

It seems that during the lead up to the Spanish-American War McKinley needed to get word to a rebel leader holed up somewhere in the Cuban hinterland. He called in his best agent and said:

“I need you to take this message to Carlos. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know how find him. I don’t know how you get back afterwards. And if you’re caught your government will deny ever having heard of you. I don’t want any questions. I just need it done.”

And with that the agent saluted, withdrew, and completed the mission.

That’s the kind of guy Dane is. Not much for saluting, to be sure. And a word of complaint now and then has been known to escape his lips. But he got the job done. No matter how elusive the story, or how half-baked the concept of his editors; no matter how long and late the hours; no matter how uncooperative and disagreeable the sources; Dane got the journalistic job done.

And he did it with style, skill, and a dry-eyed shrewdness about politics and politicians leavened with decency and humor.

Eric and I had lunch just last week with a long time political insider who lamented Dane’s departure from the newspaper business. He said it was Dane’s passion for fairness that would most be missed. He recalled the way Dane would patiently interview him on a tough, unwelcome story.

Smith – and, arguably, Black – by most accounts are the type of journalists that most journalists were taught to be, long ago; people who told the story and kept their beliefs, their histories and their politics out of it.

Something that, unfortunately, seems to be a dying art these days.

(Correction: It’s Doug Tice, not Eric Black.  I hadn’t noticed Doug was backstopping Black on the blog)