Portions of CareerBuilder.com, a popular job recruitment Web site, are up for grabs among several newspaper companies trying to piggyback on its success.
As online advertisers migrate to the Web, most newspapers' revenues from online job advertisers are growing. But CareerBuilder is especially attractive because it is a national brand that is actually attached to newspapers and can increase their revenue while driving traffic to their Web sites. CareerBuilder's major competitors are Monster.com and HotJobs, a Yahoo operation.
Gannett, the Tribune Company and Knight Ridder each own one-third of CareerBuilder. Their contractual arrangement provided that if any of the owners was sold, the others could buy that owner's equity. So when Knight Ridder was sold to McClatchy this year, Gannett and Tribune said they wanted to buy back Knight Ridder's third.
Knight Ridder is to be sold officially to McClatchy next week. When that happens, Gannett and Tribune have the right to buy what will become McClatchy's one-third, at market value.
Tribune, for one, has indicated that it wants to own more than its current one-third of CareerBuilder, but beyond that, it is unclear how the pie might be divided.
What is clear is that several other newspaper companies are intensely interested in owning a portion of it, and its availability has set off a scramble for even a small piece.
This week, as newspaper executives and industry analysts gathered in New York for their midyear financial presentations, Gannett and Tribune had private discussions with several other newspaper companies about buying portions of the site, either as equity partners or as affiliates, according to newspaper executives who were aware of the discussions but did not want to be identified because the talks are in flux.
Some newspaper companies are considering ties with Yahoo, the executives said. Such an affiliation could eventually allow the newspapers to form alliances with one another in potentially lucrative areas other than job recruitment, including news searches.
By joining forces with other newspaper companies, CareerBuilder could extend its reach. It currently has affiliations with 172 newspapers, including Gannett's 90 dailies and Tribune's 11 dailies, and covers 40 percent of the country.
"It's safe to say we're talking to everybody," Matt Ferguson, president and chief executive of CareerBuilder, told reporters after his presentation in New York yesterday.
"Both Tribune and Gannett plan on buying up their equity amounts," he said. "How much that is is still very open.
CareerBuilder had 8.1 million visitors in May, a 9 percent increase from April, according to comScore Media Metrix, which measures Web traffic. Monster.com, by comparison, had 7.3 million visitors and HotJobs had 3.4 million. It is not known how much CareerBuilder is worth, but some analysts have suggested that one-third of the company could be worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mr. Ferguson said he hoped McClatchy, which owns papers in California as well as North Carolina and Minneapolis, would stay as part of the mix.
"We'd love to keep McClatchy as a partner," he said. "We're talking to them about how we can do that. And if it makes sense, there's a deal there, it'll happen. If not, we'll be fine."
Gary B. Pruitt, the chief executive of McClatchy, said his preference would be to maintain a stake in CareerBuilder, but if not, he said he expected a "big check."
"We'll either be a partner or we'll have a lot of money from the proceeds to pay down our debt" from the Knight Ridder deal, he said. "We're in discussions and it's unresolved, but there are other options."
McClatchy paid $4.5 billion for Knight Ridder, and it will still be in debt after selling 12 of the 32 papers in the chain for about $2 billion.
