Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn., By Dave Beal Pioneer Press column: 25 years of ups and downs.

Byline: Dave Beal Pioneer Press

Jul. 2--I'm retiring. Well, sort of. I'll continue to write this column occasionally for the Pioneer Press, but this is my swan song as a full-time salaried columnist for the paper. So, in a sense, this day caps a 45-year career in newspaper journalism. I've spent most of this time as a business journalist -- the first 20 years for seven employers in five states; the last 25 at the Pioneer Press. For three-fourths of this stretch, I've been a local business columnist. Since 1982, I've written roughly 2,300 business columns for the Pioneer Press. Before that, I wrote 400 or so for the Milwaukee Journal and the Binghamton (N.Y.) Press. "That's up there," says Jon Lansner, a fellow business columnist at the Orange County Register in California and the immediate past president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

This kind of longevity is becoming more unusual. Bill Tammeus, a past president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, retired last week after writing faith-related and editorial page columns for the Kansas City Star since 1977. Today, Tammeus says, few journalists get columns early enough in their careers to write them for decades and decades. Or if …