Monster forges more deals with publishers

Online competitors like Craigslist are luring away advertisers

NEW YORK » Monster Worldwide Inc., a leading provider of online help-wanted advertising, announced partnerships with four newspaper publishers yesterday, expanding its base of advertising-sharing arrangements with traditional media companies.

Among the companies named in yesterday's announcement was the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, which has been partnering with Monster.com since late 2001 and was one of the first newspapers to agree to such a relationship.

"It offers our recruitment advertisers increased employment advertising," said Dave Kennedy, vice president of marketing for the Star-Bulletin and its sister publication, MidWeek. "The advertisers are getting the benefits of the largest print reach on Oahu, as well as one of the most well-known branded recruitment sites, Monster.com, that has been around for years."

The news comes one week after Yahoo Inc. announced a broader arrangement with more than 150 newspapers in which Yahoo's HotJobs site -- a rival to Monster -- will work together with the newspapers on classified employment advertising.

Under the new deals, Monster will build and maintain job-search Web sites for its for new newspaper partners and integrate the listings with its global recruitment database, which is accessible from its main site, Monster.com.

"It seems like it's taken Monster awhile, but they're finally getting to the point where they understand the relationship with newspapers and vice versa," Kennedy said.

The partnerships bring in newspapers from Freedom Communications Inc., a privately held media company in California whose flagship newspaper is the Orange County Register; North Jersey Media Group, which publishes the Record of Bergen County; as well as the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader in Pennsylvania.

In addition to the Star-Bulletin, Monster also has similar agreements with the two metro newspapers in Philadelphia -- the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News -- as well as the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio.

In addition to Yahoo's HotJobs site, Monster also competes with CareerBuilder, a print and online help-wanted advertising venture that is owned by three large newspaper publishers, Gannett Co., McClatchy Co. and Tribune Co.

Classified advertising for jobs, autos and real estate has long been a cash cow for newspapers, but that business model has been coming under pressure as online operations like Craigslist siphon away job listings and other kinds of ads.

Peter Newton, the general manager of small and midsized businesses at Monster, said the newspaper deals were part of a strategy to expand the company's reach into local media outlets, centered on newspapers.

Several of the newspapers that have signed up to work with Monster had been part of CareerBuilder because their former owner, Knight Ridder Inc., was one of the partners in the venture before being acquired by McClatchy earlier this year.

McClatchy bought most of Knight Ridder's newspapers and also retained most of Knight Ridder's stake in CareerBuilder. Several of the newspapers now cooperating with Monster, including the Philadelphia papers, Akron and Wilkes-Barre, Pa., were among those that McClatchy sold to a variety of private owners.