• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, November 28, 2006

As part of a broad push to forge links with traditional newspapers, online career site Monster.com has struck deals with dozens of newspapers, including The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, The (Bergen) Record, and the Orange County Register in California. The employment site now has agreements in place to power online job listings for around 40 daily papers throughout the country.

The move is just one of several recent major alliances between Internet companies and traditional newspapers. Last week, Yahoo announced a similar deal to power job listings for 175 papers nationwide. And earlier this month, Google said it intended to start selling newspaper ads for 50 papers.

The newspapers' deal with Monster.com gives the local papers immediate access to the national listings offered by Web companies, while also providing Monster.com--which tends to focus on major metropolitan cities--a new trove of job listings in small and mid-size markets. "We have a great consumer audience in small and mid-size markets, but our penetration among local businesses is not as high in those markets," said Peter Newton, Monster's senior vice president for small and medium business.

The agreements also mark a defensive maneuver on the part of newspapers, which tend to view Web companies as rivals for both eyeballs and ad revenue, says newspaper industry analyst John Morton of Morton Research in Silver Spring, Md.

"It used to be that newspapers were very religious about keeping their content, including classified advertising, to themselves," Morton said. But the advantage of sharing content with companies like Monster and HotJobs is that the deals will deter those firms from beefing up efforts to garner local job listings. "It enables newspapers to protect themselves," he said.

Monster made inroads into online newspapers in August, when it replaced CareerBuilder.com as the Web partner for online job listings for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. Monster.com's Newton said the deal has resulted in an increase in traffic; last month, the site drew 15% more visitors than in October of 2005, he said.

Since this summer, Monster.com also replaced CareerBuilder at the Akron Beacon Journaland the Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre.

Publishers involved in the deal unveiled Monday include the North Jersey Media Group, which owns The (Bergen) Record, Herald News, and 44 weekly newspapers, and Freedom Communications, which publishes newspapers including Orange County Register in California and eight TV properties. One of the Freedom Communications' papers, The Gazette of Colorado Springs, Colo., previously had a similar deal with CareerBuilder.com.