If you're not familiar with The Odyssey, here's a brief description: college students from different campuses all over the country write for their particular campus's branch. That writing is then published on the main Odyssey website. Numbers suggest that it is one of the most widely-read online site, and that is probably because writers are encouraged to aggressively share their content on social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram (if they find an attractive way to do so, as since launching the new beta site, the Odyssey does not offer ways to easily share on sites other than Facebook and Twitter). Their CEO Evan Burns espouses the belief of "democratized content," which in some ways could be laudable, but in other ways results in articles like the one I responded to in this post and criticism found in the much shared, "An Open Letter to The Odyssey Online." And this one. And this one. There are more, but I'll stop there.
I wrote for the Odyssey, as noted by the tag I had for the articles I wrote on the website. I was Editor-in-Chief for my campus, as well as being EIC for a print fine arts journal (Bridge 13 out now). The most irritating thing about writing for the Odyssey wasn't trying to figure out how to garner more shares, or convince my team that we needed to work towards the common goal of meeting minimum article counts or the general management issues that anyone who is in charge of a team of people has to face. It was, almost consistently, the content management system (which will be referred to as the CMS throughout the rest of this post). Frequently, there were issues with the CMS that led to writers not being able to put images into their listicles, or being unable to track shares correctly, or not being able to share on Facebook, and so on. The CMS was buggy throughout my entire time working with the Odyssey, even after various upgrades offered that seemed to do absolutely nothing, and according to my successor, it's still buggy.
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