Our Visual Appeal: Help Support Reading the Pictures

This holiday season, Reading the Pictures is asking for your support. Our small non-profit remains an essential visual literacy and media literacy resource. In this hyper-commercial and polarized culture, bringing context and clarity to media imagery is more important than ever.

Why do we need your help now?

A major reason is to help us launch an exciting new initiative we call RTP-Learning. In early 2020, we will be enhancing our website and adding new features and services to support visual journalism, communications, and media studies programs across the country. Lead by visual scholar, Katie Irwin, this program will connect students and faculty to our experts, our programming, as well our archive of over 6,500 posts and custom videos.

We also need funding to maintain and grow our visual analysis and content distribution.

The growth effort is well underway. In 2019, for example, we:

-Formally launched the bi-monthly “Chatting the Pictures,” a professional 10-minute webcast featuring RTP Publisher Michael Shaw and Professor Cara Finnegan, that analyzes the most informative, aesthetic and well-edited photos in the media sphere. As part of the effort, we also welcomed producer and editor Liliana Michelena.

-Expanded our pipeline of articles from visual scholars, the effort driven by new site editor, Professor Philip Perdue.

-Doubled our Instagram output, and tuned up our newsletter with the addition of journalist Pat Nabong.

-Extending our brand in the media sphere, we contributed a major visual forensic investigation to The New York Times Magazine, and we continue to provide visual analysis to Columbia Journalism Review.

As the culture becomes ever more visual, people look to us to help curate and analyze the key imagery of the day.

As a 501c3 non-profit, your tax-deductible donation is greatly needed and appreciated.

After 15 years of delivering value, we remain the only organization analyzing news photography on a consistent basis. Please help sustain our role as vigorous curators and analysts of news, media, and documentary photography for the public, the media, and the classroom. Donate here, or at the bottom of the post, and help us bring greater clarity and context to our visual culture.

Thanks so much, and happy holidays from the team at Reading the Pictures!

Photo by Joshua Meltzer.