Let’s get straight to the elephant in the room. It’s been a minute. Between college, extracurriculars, and work, I, your editor-in-chief and main site manager have been MIA for the better part of some months. Also, the dispersed nature of AIO’s own content at the beginning of the year made it difficult to determine which things to report on and review. And let me say, no one is more disappointed in the state of affairs here at AWB than myself. This is a somewhat of a nightmare scenario for me; if you’ll remember the goals from a few years ago, this sort of situation is simply never supposed to happen and is antithetical to the vision for AWB. We’re going to make a switch over the rest of 2026. That’s all internals. Looking outward, apparently, there couldn’t have been a worse time for this site to go dark. After that initial scattered period AIO has been making some big moves. Adventures in Odyssey has been undergoing some critical changes that cannot go unaddressed. On top of all this, our sister sites have been left adrift in the water, and the What’s Odyssey Podcast and the Destruction of Truth series could not be more needed socially right now. Those are adrift right now as well. All that to say, we need to infuse some electricity around here. All is not lost, however.
As far as positive AWB-related updates, everything is not completely unmoving. On top of finishing that AI use policy for our members, I have now twice hopped onto Michael LaFaver’s reemerging AIO Audio News to talk about the most prominent Odyssey happenings. In the rest of the spare time I’ve had to work on AIO projects, I’ve been developing a dedicated WOP website from which we’ll launch the long-awaited Season 2 of the show. Over the past two weeks, I’ve stitched together the final scripts for the first three episodes, as well as begun editing them. A release date for episode 1 will be announced shortly.
It is imperative at this time to restore the community aspect of AWB. Invitations to join the AWB community will return; we need all the folks we can get. The Instagram follower push will unpause, and relevant content will justify that. I truly quit while it was ahead: we had gotten about 40 short of 400 followers when everything dissolved. As I’ll explain in an upcoming post, fully about Adventures in Odyssey, and as I’ve already alluded to here, specific decisions the AIO team decides to make over the next several months will permanently alter the course of one of the final frontiers of quality American media. It’s strange; with how much time has passed, it feels like I am starting from scratch. In a way, I am. In one of the most prominent articles from last year, I firmly reminded you, AWB’s readers, that our place as both an organization and as fans was to be an objective-but-firm voice for Odyssey fans and a check on what AIO is doing. “Making the best Odyssey possible.” That mission hasn’t changed. I’d like to add on something as well. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been evaluating the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. I love the idea of applying that to the writers who will join us in the next chapter of our journey. Upholding a high-level of journalism (because that is what we’re moving to) is one of the highest priorities for me, even for this small fan media service, even for opinion articles.
Here’s another element to this impromptu hiatus. I, myself, have been hard-pressed to diversify the style of content I do. The What’s Odyssey Podcast was and is an attempt to hit this, but even still, that was only one step in the original vision for this content creation platform. For example, over the hiatus, I posted a video to WOP celebrating the Artemis moon landing. It flopped. Now, multiple factors may have influenced this, but the point remains that although AWB has grown to one of the biggest in the Odyssey bubble, we are still in the Odyssey bubble. That original vision I mentioned involved expanding AWB into a more well-rounded media review source for otherwise unnoticed and niche media. But even beyond that, I have interests beyond Odyssey! I have several unreleased drafts for projects on things like worship media, politics, history, governance, and some of those niche media sources I mentioned. It just happens that this is not the appropriate platform for them. Thinking about how to integrate those has been a source of much contemplation for me. Of course, AWB is under a media company (Writer’s Block Media), so that will always be under consideration as well.
Several posts will be releasing over the next several days we reestablish our presence in the Odyssey fan space. Those posts will include a follow up newsletter in the middle of this week. The goal of all of this site’s content this summer will be to evaluate where Odyssey has shined and push for a comeback. We’ll establish how that’ll happen in two long articles also coming up. Let’s turn 2026 around. I hope you’ll come along.
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