Alan Taylor: The biggest change is the name, the Photo section, and the fact that In Focus really isn’t really going away — it’s just becoming more of standard part of the website of the magazine itself. Instead of like a standalone named blog, it’s a section, a channel — whatever you want to call that.

With doing that, that gives me the freedom to do different types of photo essays. For years now, I’ve been doing longform photo essays pretty much exclusively, and it would be nice to once and awhile just throw out a single image, or maybe do something in the future that involves different types of layouts. But for right now, that’s kind of the difference — I wanted to be able to do short form as well as longform as well as to kind of line it up the rest of the way the site is laid out.

That’s just kind of structural, but what I’m excited about is that the images are going to be both larger and smaller. It’s responsive, so it will work well on big screens — bigger than what we support now — and it will work well all the way down to handheld mobile and iPhone portrait mode. It’ll all just look really good, hopefully.

Taylor: I spend almost all of my day looking through photos, trying to find stories to tell the next day or the next week. Pretty often, I will come across a single image or two or three images, and there’s nothing more to go with it. And since I’ve made it my thing to always be posting longform narratives — constructed either from a single photographer or multiple photographers — I thought it would be confusing to mix it up, so I just shied away from doing it.

I’ve been doing the photo editing now for seven years, and now it’s nice to have the ability to do it just whenever something comes up. If I want to do a historic photo of the day, something from the archives, or something from the Library of Congress, or a really amazing photo was just released by NASA — I just don’t really have an easy outlet for that, and it’d be nice to have. And now I’m going to have it, hopefully.

Taylor: The way that audiences and then just people on the Internet in general are reading and sharing these things just changes constantly. There’s a huge amount of change going on — the shift to handhelds and mobile devices, and at the same time there are even larger screens at home. Plus sharing, now everyone has has their comfortable areas that they share with — most people have a private silo area that they share with friends, or they want to go out in public and share it there or on Reddit or something like that. There’s different customs in each of these places on how you share things, and what you don’t want to do is force a reader that here’s the way you can share something, or you can figure it out on your own. You just want to give them as many choices as possible and let them share it in a way that’s natural to them.

Right now, if you wanted to share a single image from one of our old essays, either you’d grab the entire very long URL with a little anchor tag at the end that would take you right to that single image, or you could right click and get the source of the image and share it out of context. That happens — it’s the web, people do that — but we want to let people have any way that they want to share something and just go for it.

Taylor: That’s the thing isn’t it? There are times when it can feel fairly saturated.

I mean everyone is pretty much carrying a camera with them 24/7. It’s difficult. About all I can really do — and I know what has really served me well in doing this — is just trusting my gut and putting together a good story. You can’t force your way into someone’s Facebook News Feed. You can just present yourself regularly as a place to come for quality stories. That’s what I feel what I’m fairly good at and I’ve been working hard to do. Anything else feels forced or false.

If you’re pandering to social media, if you’re going for clickbait, it cuts away at any sort of storytelling.

Taylor: There’s nothing concrete planned. I’ve played around with a lot of different formats in the past, and some have taken off and others have really not. Like reader request images, or putting images together as a quiz, like where in the world are you as a quiz using Google Maps images. I might continue to do things like that. Then and now comparisons, fading images from one to another, you only want to do that type of thing where it serves the story well and try not to be gimmicky and burn it out.

But I do really enjoy historical stories and going through archives. Just last year, I finished a long series of articles on World War I and I got to travel to the National Archives in Washington and go through their physical archives. I digitized some images for the first time and put those in there. That was just amazing.

Taylor: This is purely my opinion, but I used to think that if you want to see a really nice image, why are you looking at it on a small device? Then I started to realize and had it pounded into my thick skull that people will use the device they have with them — they will use what’s most convenient. Why should I, as a publisher or storyteller, do anything that would punish somebody for how they choose to see what I’ve got to show? So If I can make it simple and accessible and easy to view, who am I to say anything about what size screen they’re using it for? Let’s make it the best we can for whatever size screen they’re using. That’s the beauty of responsive design, and I’d like to think about it that way.