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Gary Pearce says Pat Stith is the "best reporter there ever was."

In a post on Talking About Politics, the longtime Democratic consultant has high praise for the longtime investigative reporter, who will retire from the N&O next month.

Pat Stith is the best reporter there ever was. 

Not at The News & Observer. Not in North Carolina. The best. Ever. Anywhere.

I had the good luck to work with him at the N&O in the early 70s. We once worked together on a story about state government misusing federal jobs money. I learned more about journalism that month than I would have learned at journalism school.

He is absolutely honest. And the most competitive person I ever met.

He says the N&O has "lost its soul" with the departure of Stith. 

Ken Otterbourg says Pat Stith will be missed.

In a post on Otterblog, the managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal laments the impending retirement of the longtime N&O reporter.

Pat is the real deal, and it's not overstating things to say his reporting has led to a better North Carolina. Journalists like the phrase "end of an era" and so we throw it around like a Frisbee, but this is one of those occasions where it truly applies. Pat came to the N&O before Watergate, and he leaves at the moment in time when the public-service journalism that he has embodied is under pressure like never before.

He says that one of Stith's "most remarkable traits is his generous spirit."

"I feel fairly safe to say that if I called him up in the middle of the night and needed a favor, he would try to help me out," he writes.

Another comment on N&O reporter Pat Stith's retirement.

"Pat has done more than any public official during the last 40 years to keep North Carolina goverment clean," said former NC. Supreme Court Chief Justice Burley Mitchell today.

Dishonest and incompetent bureaucrats across North Carolina breathe a little easier today.

Pat Stith, a Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter who has exposed government corruption for 37 years at the News & Observer, will retire next month, Mandy Locke reports.

Stith's work sprang a man from prison and put five others behind bars. His revelations prompted rewrites of the state's workers' compensation laws, pointed out the environmental dangers caused by the pork industry and, most recently, revealed more than $400 million wasted by the state's mental health reforms.

"For almost 40 years, Pat Stith has been the soul of this paper," said Executive Editor John Drescher, who has known Stith for 27 years. "He represents the best of what we are: tough, fair, honest, vigilant and hardworking."

Stith, who had been pondering retirement for some time, accepted a voluntary buyout recently offered to full-time newsroom employees.

He will be greatly missed by his colleagues and readers. Just not by those bureaucrats.