What do you want to read? Something that makes you happy? Something that makes you sad? I can link you 20 articles about Ebola written in the past three days. The articles on the front page of The Odyssey Online are about the GOP debate [1-5], Jon Stewart [6-8], and India banning pornography [9].

The front page ofDigg is “How a Failed Mountain Climb Spawned An Epic Documentary” [10] and “The Original Paleo Diet was Full of Carbs” [11]. The front page ofThe New York Times includes “AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet Traffic, Files Reveal” [12] and “Airbnb Horror Story Points to Need for Precautions” [13]. The front page ofFox News reports “Almanac predicts frigid temps, more snow in winter” [14] and a big infographic of the Stock Market. I'm not mocking these articles, nor am I considering them frivolous. I just think it is absurd the vast quantity of articles on the most minute and most mundane information.

Is this what you want? Is this what I should be writing about? It might kill me to write an article like “The hookup generation got outdone by the boomers: Why do millennials have fewer sex partners than their parents?” [15]. However, I don’t write for Salon magazine; I write for The Odyssey Online.

Then, one should ask, what should writers for The Odyssey Online be writing about? Well, here’s the description of what The Odyssey Online is: “The Odyssey is flipping local news upside down with a new approach that combines the power of locally developed content, national reach, and a gamified content creation process. By capturing real conversations in local communities, we can impact conversations locally, nationally, and around the globe.” Admirable, vague, and achievable. Excellent job, Odyssey Online. Though this sounds very mission statement-ish, I think this is actually our directive as writers for this community. “Local news… [combining] locally developed content, national reach, and a gamified content creation process.”

For this week, I wrote an article about The White House’s Spotify playlist. The article detailed my thoughts both scathing and good-hearted about the songs, the order in which the songs were listed, and some fleeting argument contrasting the meanings of certain songs with the effectiveness of President Obama’s tenure. Enjoying music is not unique, but one’s taste in music is idiosyncratic, and my critique would have been, like everything else I’ve written about, grotesquely subjective. More importantly, would that article have achieved any of the qualities of The Odyssey’s mission statement? Maybe it would have. It certainly would have been a more interesting article than this one.

I don’t know what you want me to write about. Hell, I don’t even know what I want to write about. However, if I have to see or read one more article about freshmen and something they don’t know or “An Open Letter to…” or some other bullshit, then I might actually have to start my own news company.

I will give you this much: I enjoy reading The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, albeit you will not find very much about Danville, Kentucky or Centre College on those sites. Still, I will try in my future articles to emulate, to the best of my ability, those articles. And I can’t promise that those articles won’t be as full of bullshit as the ones I’ve listed previously.

[1] http://theodysseyonline.com/virginia-tech/primary-...

[2] http://theodysseyonline.com/usf/another-grand-old-...

[3] http://theodysseyonline.com/ithaca/grand-old-time-...

[4] http://theodysseyonline.com/notre-dame/5-things-go...

[5] http://theodysseyonline.com/penn-state/gopdebate/1...

[6] http://theodysseyonline.com/loyola-marymount/jon-s...

[7] http://theodysseyonline.com/uni-rochester/farewell...

[8] http://theodysseyonline.com/uta/fond-farewell-jon-...

[9] http://theodysseyonline.com/uc-berkeley/india-bans...

[10] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-14/...

[11] http://munchies.vice.com/articles/the-original-pal...

[12] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-...

[13] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/your-money/airbn...

[14] http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/08/16/old-farm...

[15] http://www.salon.com/2015/05/11/the_hookup_generat...