NEW YORK (AP) -- Monster Worldwide Inc., a leading provider of online help-wanted advertising, announced partnerships with four newspaper publishers Monday, expanding its base of advertising-sharing arrangements with traditional media companies.
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 also integrate the listings with its global recruitment database, which is accessible from its main site, Monster.com.
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 and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
Monster already had similar agreements in place 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 mid-sized 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 prior to 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.
Newton said the former Knight Ridder newspapers were presented with an opportunity to work with Monster after having been "beholden" to CareerBuilder because of their previous corporate ownership.
"Once they changed ownership, they had a choice," Newton said. "They could remain with CareerBuilder, they could build their own site, or they could partner with somebody like us, which is what they chose to do."
Under the deals, Monster creates and manages a job search site for the newspapers that carries the brands of both the newspaper as well as Monster. Those listings are also added to the central job database on Monster's main site, and newspaper carries Monster's logo in print editions of its job listings as well.
Revenues are shared between Monster and the newspaper, but Newton declined to provide further detail.
Monster said it now had arrangements in place with 43 newspapers and eight television stations.
The Philadelphia newspapers were acquired by a group of local investors led by former advertising executive Brian Tierney, while Canadian media owner David Black owns both the Honolulu and Akron papers. Newspaper executive Richard Connor owns and publishes the Wilkes-Barre paper.
