KR, TRIBUNE BID TO CREATE A CLASSIFIED POWERHOUSE

By: Lucia Moses New CareerBuilder Site Seeks To Dominate


Newspapers, facing the loss of a key revenue source to the Internet, have
a choice: lead, follow, or get out of the way.



Knight Ridder and the Tribune Co. think they've found the way to lead in
the race to become the top provider of job listings as a critical source
of newspaper revenue migrates to the Web. The two newspaper-based companies
are paying about $200 million to buy CareerBuilder Inc. - and an undisclosed
amount to purchase the partnership interests in CareerPath.com held by five
other newspaper companies - to create a single online job service. In doing
so, the two media powerhouses are betting that a bigger site will give them
greater national reach as consolidation threatens to wipe out all but the
top few online job sites.



'There's too many players to get the awareness of the limited audience,'
said Michele Pelino, an analyst with the Yankee Group, a Boston-based
online market research firm. 'Over time, you're going to see a fallout
of different players. I think synergies are going to make it easier to
gain national traction.'



Online classifieds account for only a sliver of the overall classified
market now. But estimates call for the segment to increase as much as
sevenfold in the next five years. Much of the growth is expected to
come from recruitment ads, the biggest classified category, dollarwise.



The merged company, to be called CareerBuilder Network, believes its
superiority will come from its audience reach and filtering search
technology. The company claims it will post 110,000 new jobs each week
to have more listings than Monster.com. Filters will let prospective
employees and employers conduct highly targeted searches via Tribune's
and Knight Ridder's newspaper Web sites as well as other online sites.
CareerBuilder believes sites will be measured by how well they match
people and reach passive job seekers, not just by how many listings and
eyeballs they have. 'It's the quality over quantity,' CareerBuilder
spokesman Barry Lawrence said.



The planned buyout leaves CareerPath.com's five other newspaper owners
re-evaluating their online classified strategies. The five may keep their
listings in the new network. All but the New York Times Co., which says
it is pulling out, say it's too soon to tell what they'll do. The Times
Co. said it already has a big enough national audience to attract people
to its Web classifieds. So do two other CareerPath.com partners, Gannett
Co. Inc. and the Washington Post Co.; the other partners are the Hearst
Corp. and Cox Interactive Media. Cox may keep its listings on CareerBuilder,
but is focusing on building its online listing sites in its own newspaper

markets, Cox Newspapers Inc. President Jay R. Smith said. 'We recognize
about 90% of all hiring is local,' he said.



Started five years ago, CareerPath.com grew to fourth place among online
job sites in May in terms of eyeballs, with nearly 1.7 million unique
visitors, according to Media Metrix Inc. But it ranked far behind giants
such as America Online Inc.'s Workplace Channel (more than 4.8 million
visitors), Monster.com (more than 3.8 million visitors), and Jobsonline.com
(more than 3.7 million visitors).



Observers said CareerPath.com's multiple owners made it difficult for the
company to set a course. 'They certainly have different directions and
different strategic goals,' said Peter M. Zollman, founder of Classified
Intelligence, an Internet classified consultancy. 'That makes it next to
impossible to run a company where everybody had equal ownership and all
have a say. There are some that believe this is a newspaper strategy, and
some believe it's a new business,' Zollman said. 'Tribune and Knight Ridder
are geared very heavily toward building a new business.'













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Lucia Moses (lmoses@editorandpublisher.com) is an associate editor for
Editor & Publisher magazine.












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