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“In every proposal I write to a client where I’m not doing corporate identity work, I give them the option to where I will, free of charge and as a benefit to the community, package and licence the work I do for them under a Creative Commons licence. Once I’m done with their work, I’ll personally distribute the work on my site of give the packages to them for distribution if they ever wish to open-source the project. It’s an absurd premise from a designer, to say ‘Hey, you pay me to make this for you, and then I’ll release it for free to everyone else.’ It was a risk I took to see if my clients had any interest in the surrounding community.”

In a socially-driven atmosphere on the brink of being devoured by powerful investors and American capitalism, I offered my clients an option to have their work released freely, under a community-supporting licence such as the Creative Commons Licences or the GNU GPL, as a free-of-charge option. The results were surprising. Will proprietary licences and commercialism destroy Web 2.0’s democracy?

“Sadly, regardless of traditionalism, the common reader and user is honestly entirely apathetic to this editorial control. Jeff Jarvis had it right when he stated ‘give people control of the media, [and] they will use it.’ In our socially-networked world, this apathy is painfully evident that as we watch the increasing popularity of social news services such as Digg and Newsvine. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Rupert Murdoch, the head of media conglomerate News Corporation, stated the shift in control bluntly: ‘[Those in the online generation] want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.’”

As traditional journalists feel the backlash of print media’s decreasing popularity, citing a loss of reputability and editorial control, they’re not realising the shift in authority: editorial control still exists; it’s just moved to those who shape new media.

It’s necessary to listen to our readers’ feedback both on content and design, even if the only feedback we’re receiving is in the form of statistics. I explore a scrapped redesign, content e-mails, and the rules of web usability to come to a powerful conclusion that we are doing more than maintaining our own sites: we’re maintaining the social infrastructure that Web 2.0 is founded upon.

I explore American Apparel’s design and marketing, only to find that the Lomography of apparel has gotten absolutely everything right in four steps, none of which include a supermodel.

“It is with this same condescension that the editors look down upon the democracy and socially-aware self-government of independent news sites such as MetaFilter and Digg as well as Internet media phenomena such as the blogosphere and Web 2.0. Hypocritically, however, they are amazed at the extensive amount of participation present on such sites and want to harness them for their own content. Herein lies the paradox of online journalism: they want Web 2.0 and its social audience without the social aspect that lies at the core of the Web 2.0 infrastructure.”

After a lengthy debate with my boss and editor-in-chief of The Michigan Daily, Jason Pesick, I attack the problem of online journalism from both the perspectives of a designer and an editor. I’ve got a pretty good feeling that I know which one will win.