ABC News hooks up with Yahoo to stream its news content online

ABC News will begin distributing its news content through Yahoo, it announced today.

The partnership with ABC News would be a return to form of sorts for Yahoo, which was originally born as a portal site that would direct viewers and readers to content on other sites. Yahoo has tried its hand at several distribution and online content channels. It acquired Flickr, an online image hosting site, in 2005 and also acquired social bookmarking site Delicious — which it announced it would “sunset” last year and eventually decided to sell.

ABC News will be a “premier” news content provider for Yahoo’s news channels. Both companies will coordinate their teams to generate original content that they will cross-post to both Yahoo’s news site and ABC’s site. Together, Yahoo and ABC have roughly 100 million regular monthly viewers, the companies said today.

Yahoo recently fired Carol Bartz (pictured above) as the company’s chief executive. She was appointed CEO in 2009, inheriting a company that had slid, over the years, from a web search pioneer to a massive slow-moving media company that watched its dominance slowly ebb away. Since then, the company has been under pressure to find a way to remain relevant as Facebook and Google have rapidly ripped away the company’s share of online advertising.

Yahoo’s share of overall U.S. online ad revenues will decline to 11 percent this year, down from 13.3 percent a year ago, according to online market research firm eMarketer. Google’s share is expected to grow to 40.8 percent this year, up from 38.5 percent in 2010 and 34.9 percent in 2009, while Facebook’s share should reach 7 percent this year, up from 4.6 percent last year, according to the firm.

Both Yahoo and ABC’s news teams will also have live coverage of events based in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles — which will be streamed through Yahoo’s online sites. Yahoo gets a number of exclusive online video streams from ABC News through the deal, such as a video interview with President Barack Obama with ABC News. ABC News content will be integrated throughout the Yahoo’s news sites and Yahoo’s front page.

Yahoo experienced some rare support from the market after the announcement today. Its shares rose nearly 4 percent in trading before the bell — a jump the company hasn’t experienced since it ousted Bartz, a move that investors gleefully accepted. Interest in Yahoo has slipped in recent weeks as a number of potential buyers, including Alibaba, began circling the company.