Someone posted an article bashing the Odyssey in my community’s GroupMe page. It classified the Odyssey as a typical source of news produced by people of white privilege and similar opinions. In response to this, I wanted to tell all of you what the Odyssey ACTUALLY is--and how it works.
Every college student in the nation has the ability to apply to write for The Odyssey Online. Most of the Odyssey’s content, if not all, is produced from college students writing articles about things they love and feel passionate about. We are not a pre-selected group of people writing with some hidden agenda produced by our editors and managing editors, even though some people tend to believe this.
As creators, we follow a consistent weekly schedule in which we share articles we have written during the week, submit a new one every week for publishing, and our new articles are always posted on Mondays (with some exceptions and leniency). Every week, we tell our editors and managing editors what we plan on writing about, but almost every time they say okay and give us the "go ahead" on our topics--topics we pick. Our article topics are completely up to us and, usually, we come up with the topics based on things happening in our everyday lives.
Furthermore, we can make the articles as factual or as opinionated as we decide we want them to be! We can use sources and cite the heck out of everything we write in order to produce a hard-hitting news piece, or we can write blog style posts, focusing on writing things that make us happy, whether they are important to a greater population or not.
Contrary to popular belief, writers within our communities are actually fairly diverse in thought and belief. We are not all rich white kids, even though many reviews of our website tend to believe this. Yes, we have white teenagers in our communities, but we also have members of the LGBTQ community, Asians, African-Americans, and many other types of kids in our communities. To call us a social media platform of rich, white privileged kids is actually very inaccurate.
Now, let’s discuss money. As shown in several news sources, last year The Odyssey Online made over $25 million dollars in profit. However, most content creators and EICs (editor-in-chiefs) are unpaid positions. We volunteer our time and opinions to The Odyssey and often times receive no monetary incentive for it. Do not get me wrong, some EICs and content creators do make money (usually the ones responsible for highly viral articles), but the majority of us do not. We are not writing to please, and we are not writing for money; we are writing because we want to and we want to get our voices out there.
I wanted to offer a little insight into what the Odyssey is so that everyone could stop bashing it without knowing what is behind it. When you read our articles, don’t look at us like we are going to give you something that the NYT or BBC would give you. We are not the New York Times or BBC, we are our own company composed of 18-25 year olds writing about things WE care about. Please keep this in mind next time you are on our website.
