Jimmy Wales wrote:
We are big and getting bigger. Millions of people see our work each year. Millions of people love what we are doing, love the idea of it, and would love to help. We need to give them tools and incentives to do exactly that.
Or, we "make a deal" with some of the companies that supply the news agencies with pictures. As you said, we're gettin bigger, meaning more and more people will view wikipedia pages. If the image description would read "Image by [[Reuters]], released under GFDL", it would be a great advertivement for them, and it would cost them only a small image, perhaps of second-grade quality (which would be fine for us, but never printed in a magazine anyway).
Magnus