NewsCom manages, licenses and distributes digital content from 95 content partners for editorial and commercial use. A joint venture of Tribune Media Services and Knight Ridder, NewsCom is a resource for the global publishing industry with media assets from leading content partners that include Agence France Press, Deutsche Presse Agenteur, Getty Images, Kyodo, Jupiter Images, TASS, UPI, and WireImage.

“We are pleased to work with Voxant to expand our distribution to online publishers, as well as enter new markets with topical bundled packages of news,” said NewsCom GM Bill Creighton, in a statement . “Voxant’s viral mashing technology, along with the breadth and depth of its existing news distribution network, makes them the ideal partner to distribute our content to places we aren’t currently reaching.”

Voxant CEO Jeff Crigler adds, “The addition of NewsCom still photos to our library of content provides a vital daily source for our customers who want to distribute news in every format, including online video, audio, text and images. NewsCom is an ideal content partner with a rich array of global news images, and we are pleased to help expand its market reach through growth opportunities in the online news market.”

Knight Ridder’s sale is emblematic of a continuing trend. In the past, publishers could attract advertisers with the right content and distribution, thus ensuring long-term success. This reliable form of revenue has been changed by the evolution of the Internet as a vital means to communicating with consumers. Internet properties are quickly becoming a replacement for traditional publishing sources, as readers can now simply go online to one site and obtain all their daily news items without having to access multiple sources.

Online competition means shrinking readership for the traditional publishers, which ultimately translates into lost revenues. The Newspaper Association of America states that daily newspaper circulation is down 13% from its peak of 62.8 million in 1985. Consider that The San Jose Mercury News, one of the 32 daily newspapers owned by Knight Ridder, at its peak in 2000, had a Sunday circulation of 326,839 subscribers. Last September, the company counted 278,470 Sunday subscribers, a drop of about 15 percent.

While changing reader dynamics and a decline in 2001 in the technology economy had some bearing on circulation at the Mercury News, the publisher must also be concerned by the potential increased impact of online giants like Google and Yahoo!. Regardless, the problem they face is simple, a shrinking revenue stream for these publishers.

So what should newspapers do? For many the answer has been to partner with Google, Yahoo! and other providers of online marketing services as a means of monetizing their content on the web. The problem with this approach is that even as Google and Yahoo! are delivering added revenue streams, they could potentially decide to use the revenues they generate from this model to fuel their own growth and to ultimately build their own brand and website. In other words, this relationship could further strengthen the position of these industry giants.

As each day passes, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other large web-media players gain a stronger foothold with the introduction of new services like Google Base. The advent of Google Base threatens the publishing community’s previously stable classified advertising revenue stream. In the case of San Jose Mercury News, revenue from the company’s help-wanted Ads fell to $18 million a year in 2005 from more than $118 million in 2000 (San Jose Mercury News).