(Okay, I suppose some of you have been assigned to covering folks at the mall, but still….)

Allow me to turn things over to you today. How are you feeling about your journalism career, as the first decade of the 21st century moves toward its finish? How thankful are you for your role in journalism today?

Me? I’ve been on my own for going on 18 months now, and am throughly enjoying the adventure, though the lack of a constant paycheck (and employer-paid retirement or health benefits for my family) cranks up the stress some months.

But how much security would I have now working in a newsroom? Not so much, I’m afraid. At least by working on my own, I can exert more control over my future, building an audience, soliciting advertisers, and working new income opportunities. I’m not dependent upon a boss figuring out those new revenue opportunities, or a corporate board freaking out about its ROI. My life, and career, are on me, alone, and given how much bad management’s out there in this field today – that might be the most secure position to be in.

I’d love to hear where OJR readers are, and what you think. Please answer the poll question above by clicking on the situation closest to yours’, and then leave a thought in the comments. (Please also note that comments are held for review before being posted live to the site, no thanks to the spammers who seem to think this a lucrative place to post.)

Thank you for your ongoing support of OJR, and have a wonderful holiday season!

Obviously, being housed and paid for by the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, OJR’s not exactly a neutral forum for this question. One might suspect that we’d have a larger-than-expected number of j-school folk hanging around here. But we do get a fair number of readers who did not come up through the traditional journalism ranks. So perhaps that will even things out a bit.

When answering this week’s question, go ahead and consider yourself a journalism school graduate if your college or university did not have a separate school of journalism, and you majored in journalism within some other school.

Finally, in the comments, we’d love to hear your thoughts on journalism school. Let’s give some advice to the students, and prospective students, reading OJR. Is a j-school degree necessary, or even helpful, to writing or publishing online? If you don’t have a j-school degree, do you wish you did? And if you do, do you now wish you’d majored in something else?

What’s the best typeface for displaying text on the Web? I’m sure that many of you have your favorite studies, focus groups and/or personal biases to defend your choice. And we’d love to read about those in the comments.

For the undecided, I’ve provided a one-line sample of each, using a style call for those type faces. If you do not have it on your machine, the line likely will render in either Arial (OJR’s default) or whatever your browser is set to serve in lieu of Arial. (Update: I didn’t adjust the type sizes for the example below, and some typefaces work better with larger sizes, so please consider that when comparing the typefaces.)

Please explain why you chose what you voted for, in the comments. How is your choice of typeface working for readers on your website?

Personally, I’ve mostly used Arial on my websites, though I’ve begun to use more Verdana. I’ve always been adhered to the idea that sans-serif fonts worked best for body type online, but given the better quality of monitors these days, and no longer so sure. I could be swayed by some good arguments….

As online journalists, many of us straddle both worlds. Many of us work for newspaper-dot-coms; others at least started their careers in print.

Are any of us still reading the “dead tree edition?” If so, how many newspapers a day are you reading? And how many did you read a decade ago?

Journalists, one might presume, ought to be the biggest fans and consumers of journalism. Can online journalists, folks at leading edge of industry change, still be counted on to take the print edition? Or have we bailed on print, too?

Tell us in the comments which papers you still read in print, and which you would recommend. Or, if you are not reading papers in print, tell us what might help you change your mind and subscribe to a print newspaper in the future.

But let us back up for a moment, and think about an industry without such troubles. Let’s take concerns about “how to make money online” or how to avoid newsroom cutbacks off the table.

As the Internet has accelerated economic chaos within the journalism business, it has created new publishing opportunities for individual reporters. Now, you can go on your own, explore your passions, and have your work become the focus of a 24/7 community.

But would you want to? Assuming you could make as comfortable a living as a solo blogger as a newsroom reporter, which would you pick?

Please take a moment to share in the comments your vision for an ideal job in journalism.

Here’s what I wrote on OJR’s “editor’s note” yesterday: “It becomes more difficult to make a compelling argument that the decline of the professional news industry harms society when the amateurs come up with better Presidential debate questions than the pros do.”

The WaPo’s Tom Shales unloaded, too, though the NYT’s resident op/ed page conservative, David Brooks, defended the questioning.

What say you? Were the questions appropriate, useful and insightful? Or the type of horse-race, ‘inside baseball,’ gotchas that many bloggers use as justification for attacks on the so-called mainstream media?

Finally, let’s put that final assertion to a test here. Which do you think is a better source for true and accurate coverage of the White House and the race for it?

We’d love to hear your comments on these issues, too.

We’re not talking about a distinct URL that your employer has provided you for “your” articles and content on its website. We’re talking about a website that you have created and own. It could be a custom, fully-developed domain or just a Blogspot blog. It does not need to be a professional site, or even a news one. Just something that is active and your own.

I’m just curious to see what percentage of OJR readers have their own Web presence, as opposed to simply working on websites for others.

Feel free to link your site in the comments, and introduce it to other online journalists. Let’s get to know each other.

As I wrote earlier this week, the biggest challenge facing the journalism industry today is increased competition, mostly from the Web. Do you believe that the individuals managing your news organization are up to that challenge? Can they keep your news organization alive, financially viable and socially influential for the next decade?

If you are a solo publisher or blogger, you should vote on whether you trust yourself to be able to meet this challenge. If you work for an independent newsroom, you are voting on your publisher and upper-level management. If you work for a corporation, you are voting on both your local management as well as corporate leadership. After all, if one succeeds and the other fails… you still fail.

We would love to read, in the comments, your specific reasons why you think your news organization’s management will succeed, or fail.

Remember, you can log out and post anonymously now on OJR, if that makes you more comfortable writing honestly about your bosses. (Anonymous comments will be reviewed before being published and the submitting IP address will be posted with each anonymous comment. Registered members get their posts published immediately.)

But… that doesn’t mean the field can drive you nuts now and then. What most frustrates you about producing news for a website? That’s the topic of this week’s OJR question.

Please offer some specifics in the comments, and we’ll continue the discussion there. Have a great weekend!

One of the ways that the journalism industry has tried over the past few decades to reassure the public that its information is accurate is by restricting the political activity of its reporters. But does that work? Does telling reporters not to campaign, not to contribute, or even not to vote, really help build readership?

If recent trends in newspaper circulation offer evidence, the answer is “no.” But it’s hard to separate political restrictions on reporters from the other variables affecting people’s decision whether or not to read a paper.

So, the debate continues. In the build-up to the recent Super Tuesday elections, the editor of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, John Temple, ordered his newsroom’s reporters not to participate in the Colorado caucuses. (Unlike primaries, in caucuses there are not secret ballots and people must declare their preference publicly.)

“Because caucuses are party activities that involve expressing your political position in public, you should not attend them, unless you’re covering them for the Rocky,” Temple wrote, in an e-mail obtained and published by the Denver weekly Westword. Temple later reversed his decision, according to Westword.

[Disclosure: I used to work for the Rocky Mountain News, though when I edited the Rocky's website, it did not report to Temple.]

Columnist Dana Parsons of the Los Angeles Times explained why newsrooms have restricted their reporters’ political activity:

“Believe it or not, we are trying to cover these controversial social issues with objectivity. And we still have the belief that people belonging to Greenpeace, for example, shouldn’t be covering the environment.

No, that doesn’t mean we don’t have personal opinions. It just means we’re schooled that you can have an opinion and still report both sides fairly.

And if being a party activist suggests you can’t be impartial (which it would), better not to be one.”

My USC Annenberg colleague, and popular blogger, Marc Cooper, added his view in e-mail to me, coming down on the side of allowing some activity, provided that it is disclosed to readers:

“There is no set formula. My personal view is one of common sense i.e. that obvious conflicts of interest must be avoided. Someone actively involved in a campaign should not be writing about it as and objective observer unless, of course, your editor actually wants a first-person piece with a defined POV (This is common in the journals of opinion I have worked for as compared to most newspapers).

Whether or not a political affairs journalist should be allowed to make a financial contribution to a campaign is, again, a matter that is determined on an employer-by-employer basis. Some permit it. Some don’t. Some won’t even allow their reporters to put a partisan bumpersticker on his or her car.

Again, my personal view is that I would prefer political reporters be passionate and engaged in the process so long as they fully disclose their preferences. Their work can then be fully evaluated for its fairness. I am suspicious of political reporters who have no views. This, however, is a minority position within the profession.”

My take? The winners in the Internet publishing business will be those who write with deep knowledge and committed passion for the topics that they cover. Given that few areas of life stand completely unaffected by elected government, every beat will have some political element. A journalist’s job is to investigate and to report on controversies, including political ones. It’s ridiculous to believe that their reporting is not going to ever lead them to conclude that certain parties’ or certain candidates’ positions are better for their audience than others’.

If that’s the case, those journalists’ reporting would be incomplete — even misleading — if it did not acknowledge and explain the reasons for those conclusions.

Asking journalists to remain silent on politics cheats readers by promoting the idea that a well-informed, “objective” source will have nothing to say about which candidates for elected office offer the best hope for a community. If a reporter’s got nothing to say, why should anyone read him/her?

Furthermore, it’s hard to rest any non-participation policy on the need for “objectivity” when there’s a such a schism in America today over what “objectivity” even means.

Almost everyone working in journalism today ascribes to a post-Englightenment view of truth as deriving from empirical evidence. Collect the data, check them, test them, and we’ll support the hypothesis that they support.

But there’s a massive segment of the public that finds its truth not from empiricism but from creed and canon. In its most popular form in the United States, it is the belief by Christian fundamentalists that physical evidence can and is manipulated by the will of God. Therefore, mankind ought to find truth not through the transience of the physical world but through the enduring word of Scripture.

Therefore, any news reporting that relies completely upon empiricism and that does not acknowledge the word of Scripture cannot be considered “objective,” but is, instead, biased, incomplete and flawed.

I believe that this is the reason why so many news organizations are besieged by accusations of “liberal bias,” because they practice journalism according to a belief structure that is at odds with the belief structure of those readers who complain. The journalism industry’s concept of “objectivity” is objective only within a post-Enlightenment, pro-empiricism belief structure that is not held by a significant segment of the population. Or, in my opinion, a great many people currently in power in United States politics.

Journalists cannot be “objective” to all of their readers. The best we can do is to explain how and why we collect and report the information that we do. And if that information leads us to a specific conclusion, we should reveal that and explain how we got there. That’s truly complete reporting. Whether readers choose to believe it, or to challenge it, is up to them.

In short, allow me to quote the E.W. Scripps motto, which I saw every day atop the Rocky Mountain News when I worked in Denver: “Give light and the people will find their own way.”

Which brings up to the question of the week:

Please give us your take on this issue in the comments.

Update: When I talk about journalists, I mean anyone who publishes news online, whether they use they use the Big “J” word to describe themselves or not. Also, after I’ve made my point here, I suppose I should go ahead and reveal that I voted in the California primary. For Hillary Clinton. (I was going to vote for John Edwards, but when he dropped out, I chose to go with Clinton over Barack Obama. But barely. I find Duncan Black’s analysis of the race compelling.)