The Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Massachusetts-based Monster.com, a national online employment resource, have entered into an agreement to merge lucrative recruitment advertising. Star-Bulletin,
Monster.com in
online classified ad dealBy Erika Engle
eengle@starbulletin.com
Under the agreement, employers purchasing a new package of help-wanted ads will find those positions posted on Monster.com and printed in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The newspaper also sells packaged advertising with MidWeek and Oahu military newspapers, which are also owned by Canada-based Black Press Ltd.
"We've just redone the rate package with what we've worked out with Monster," said Star-Bulletin Marketing Director Donnie Welch. "You can get all this and still be 20 to 30 percent under the competition."
Affiliations between traditional and online media are commonplace but newspaper industry insiders see this agreement as either groundbreaking or "reprehensible."
"Depending on your perspective this is either a brilliant move or the chickens letting the fox into the henhouse," said Classified Intelligence LLC founder and Executive Editor Peter M. Zollman. "I am of the opinion that given the circumstances in Honolulu this is a very wise move for the Star-Bulletin because the other paper is dominant in employment advertising, and this allows you to offer a different service to advertisers and build a new approach."
The other extreme is less flattering. "The way the publishers are looking at it is, it is as reprehensible to do that as it is to partner with the great demon Microsoft," said Martha Stone, a Chicago online news consultant for Spain-based Innovation International Media Consulting.
Online employment sites are "taking away recruitment revenue, which is one of the (top) sources of revenue for newspapers," she said. "The leader in revenue decline for newspapers worldwide is classifieds." While not privy to the financial details of the Monster-Bulletin agreement, she said the market leader or larger entity in such arrangements historically has the upper hand.
The Monster deal "seems like a desperation move," Stone said.
Stone called the Internet a better place for ads. "We're able to attach resumes and we're able to have all kinds of search capabilities" that a printed newspaper does not provide, she said.
Clearly executives at the Star-Bulletin and Monster.com see potential in the deal.
The newspaper can offer its clients "an opportunity to be in the hard copy of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin as well as advertise on a career site that has national reach," said Timothy Dittrich, Monster.com senior vice president for consumer business development. "The career opportunist (job seeker) benefits because they've got local opportunities both in the paper and online and the Monster.com name is something they've come to trust."
A co-branded online site developed for the alliance will launch later this week, perhaps Sunday, the Star-Bulletin's Welch said. The site would be accessible through Monster's Web site, as well as through the Star-Bulletin's and MidWeek's Web sites.
After accessing www.monster.com a job seeker would choose "Hawaii" as the location for a search, causing the co-branded site to appear. It features hundreds of jobs in Hawaii and other Pacific islands such as Guam, Kwajelein and Johnston Atolls. Those online listings will be the ones purchased through Monster.com directly or through the Star-Bulletin's new alliance. The job-seeker can then click through to see the print edition help-wanted ads on the Star-Bulletin or MidWeek Web sites. The Star-Bulletin and MidWeek home pages can be accessed from this page.
"One of the reasons we've done this is that the Honolulu Star-Bulletin has been very aggressive about trying to be innovative, and instead of looking at Monster as the enemy they see it as a one-plus-one-equals three scenario for their customers and this is why I think the HSB will be successful," Monster's Dittrich said.