Odyssey is ruining modern journalism...apparently.

Last night I came across the following article: The Odyssey Online is Ruining Modern Journalism on universilife.com, and it pissed me off. On its website—which has articles that very closely resemble that of Odyssey—under the "Meet the Editors" section, universilife.com is defined as:

"Not a website, but a community for college students to participate, relate and contribute to."

Hmm... does that sound familiar? That's because Odyssey is defined as:

" A social discovery platform committed to democratizing content creation while personalizing discovery. Launched in June 2014, Odyssey was founded to democratize the media business and elevate engagement, by magnifying broader perspectives and facilitating deeper conversations in and about the world."

Or, a community for millennials to communicate ideas, thoughts and issues with each other.

Often times, people ask me what Odyssey is. As a journalism major, I can tell you--it's not journalism. In fact, the entire foundation of Odyssey is to "democratize the media business," not operate within it.

While it seems that being a writer and the Editor-in-Chief of such an online platform would be a conflict of interest for a journalism major, I love it. I love being able to sit down and write whatever comes to my mind, whether it be my anger about the correlation between Bernie Sanders and the media , How IKEA knows I like the color pink via social CRM, , an interview with college students about Donald Trump, an interview with the President of Adelphi University, or my personal struggles with an eating disorder.

Odyssey isn't about being the next big news source. Odyssey is not trying to be the next New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, or Fox News. Odyssey is just trying to be Odyssey.

Stylistically speaking, creative articles like open letters and listicles generate the most amount of traffic for Odyssey. While not everything is about numbers, more traffic means more reader-writer engagement, which leads to a stronger community and so on.

And with 14,000+ content creators, 1,000+ communities and 30 million monthly views, we're doing just fine.

So, universilife.com, you're wrong. Odyssey isn't ruining modern journalism. It's peacefully coexisting alongside it. You should probably do some more research next time.