Click Listen to This Article Above on our future pieces to interact with Phoblographer in a new way.
We’re incredibly excited to officially announce a brand new feature on the site. It’s called Listen to Articles. From now on, nearly every article by The Phoblographer will have this function going forward. We’ve had it in place in a smaller capacity and have gathered some feedback. When you click on this little tool, you’ll have the article read to you. Using the power of AI, we’re bringing more interactivity to our site. Now, you can load it up on the desktop and just listen to our articles as you wish. Go ahead, do something else if you want, and return to the article when you want to look at the photos.
This is only the beginning for us. There are a host of improvements and additions that we’re going to roll out before the end of the year. Those include:
- A fully working Podcast feed in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Play Music.
- Conversational listens. Part of our backbone is the interviews we do with photographers. And we plan to have two different AI voices featured in pieces like those. The Phoblographer’s staff will be one voice, and the other will be another voice. We’re working to get this done, but it will take time.
We see this as a major step forward for us and the offerings The Phoblographer has. While many photography publications are pulling back, we’re finding ways to push forward. So far in 2020, we’ve had a considerable number of changes.
- We changed how often we publish: scaling down from seven pieces nearly every day to four carefully done stories.
- We’ve grown tremendously on Flipboard. And you can check out our storyboards there. If you’re looking for a better place to get your news, that would be the key. Through Flipboard Storyboards, we’ve done a lot to uplift POC and female voices: ones not often heard.
- We made the Amazon OnSite program. Soon, Amazon will be recommending our round-up articles in your Amazon searches to help you pick the right gear. Our commitment to ethics and recommending only gear that we’ve reviewed and like is part of our transparency. And we’ve always been this way since the start.
- We’ve also got a new Reviews Editor, and we’re very excited for you to meet her.
- We continue to pay our staff at ethical rates and not slave wages. Yes, you see a lot of ads on the site: I’ll admit to that. But, if quite literally everyone just paid $1/month, you’d not only get a more unique product, but we’d probably be able to make the site ad-free. Of course, we know lots of you don’t want to do that, so we serve ads. And I’m glad to tell you that even if you paid $1/year, the site would still do well. Again, this is because we pay ethical, fair wages.
- Each week on Zoom, we do the Pro Camera Reviews show. And you can follow it on our Facebook page, or check them out on our YouTube.
- There’s a new feature on our website near comments where you can react to articles.
This has been a lot of work. We’re still looking to expand our staff and even bring on investors. And we’ve got a clear vision for what the site will look like in the near future. Expect more changes to come soon.