Through new distribution platforms, multimedia formats and teamwork, today's photojournalists are trying to resurrect a moribund industry.

BREAKING NEWS — Photojournalism, the use of images to tell stories and convey information about topical events, from the Crimean War to this year's health-care reform debate, has died following a long and gradual illness.

The profession was approximately 150 years old...

Zuma Press, an independent press agency and wire service, won the contract for exclusive worldwide rights to syndicate the picture content of the weekly Sporting News, with in excess of 700,000 images dating back more than 118 years. The Sporting News archive has been incorporated into Zuma's web site, zumapress.com, and made available for immediate syndication by clients around the world.

Highlights include portraits of baseball's early stars by Charles M. Conlon, plus more than 300,000 historical, black-and-white images that document baseball throughout most of the 20th century. Nearly as many images cover football, basketball and hockey.

For much of the last century, photojournalists have enjoyed a host of options for disseminating their images to the world. After World War II, several cooperative news agencies, such as Magnum Photos and Black Star, thrived and competed to promote the idea of presenting news through multi-layered photo stories.

As the millennium drew near, however, the number of agency choices shrank dramatically as a series of mergers and acquisitions whittled the photojournalism industry down to a handful of major players. Although the big three — the Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP) — still dominated the world of global news-gathering cooperatives, Internet giants Corbis and Getty Images gained a stranglehold on the stock and news photography businesses by gobbling up vast photo collections.

Then a few small independent agencies, run by former photographers and photo editors, began to make an appearance on the grid of global news networks. One of the first was ZUMA Press, founded in 1995 by Scott Mc Kiernan in Laguna Beach, Calif., which recently relocated to larger offices in the nearby seaside town of Dana Point. Six years later in Manhattan, J.P. Pappis opened Polaris Images and Seamus Conlan launched World Picture Network (WPN).

All three approach the wire..