One of the eternal struggles for journalists is between the need to belong to something bigger than themselves and the urge for independence. Nearly every reporter hopes to be part of a like-minded organization—whether newspaper or online news site—that offers professional support and camaraderie, not to mention a regular paycheck and health insurance. At the same time, most chafe at the restrictions and monotony of working for the information factory. How many city council meetings or high school basketball games can you cover before you start to die? This is the conundrum Paul Hemphill (Nieman class of 1969) addresses in his bitterly trenchant essay, “Quitting the Paper.” Hemphill, the featured daily columnist at The Atlanta Journal during the late 1960s, was once the most widely read journalist in the South. He pounded out six columns a week, and at their best they were literature on deadline. Ultimately, however, he wanted to take a stab at writing books. In “Quitting the Paper”—which appeared in 1974 in Southern Voices (an excellent but short-lived glossy) and which I devoured as a journalism student at the University of Georgia—Hemphill makes the case for going it alone. His brief, while somewhat melodramatic (Hemphill was always the star of his own movie) and slightly dated (in the 1970s, the news biz was so healthy you could leave a good job confident that if your ambitions faltered you’d find another just as good), captures the never-ending tension between journalistic stability and freedom. The chilling kicker about Birmingham News sports editor Benny Marshall says it all. From the moment I finished the piece, I knew I would never be a lifer anywhere.