Article Research w/ Photos, Need Help Please

I’m looking to create a web design/programming related but with a unique aspect to it that I have in mind. I cannot tell you what that is yet to avoid ruining the project.

The question is, where are all these web design blogs getting such enormous amounts of awesome articles with photos??? I found a handful of article sites, but no photos and nothing really interesting. Popular blogs like smashing magazine for example have awesome articles with bundles of cool photos per article. Are they doing this themselves or hired editors/authors?

Some sites I found are:

http://www.articledepot.net/
http://www.articlestreet.com/
http://www.articlesbase.com/
http://www.associatedcontent.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/
http://www.pcql.com/