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September 5, 2005

The paper chase | Maine's daily newspapers band together in the help wanted section

By Taylor Smith
The newspaper world in Maine can be a competitive game. Reporters race to scoop their peers on the next hot story, and circulation managers look for ways to boost their paper's reach in hopes of landing fatter advertising contracts.

That's why it was so surprising to learn of a good-faith collaboration between Maine's largest newspaper company and one of its main competitors. In July, Portland-based Blethen Maine Newspapers, which publishes three dailies including the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, announced that it had struck a deal with the Lewiston Sun Journal to combine the newspaper's help wanted ads with its own through the Blethen Maine online home, MaineToday.com.

Behind this deal was Joe Michaud, president of MaineToday.com. Michaud says he's currently in discussion with a number of other Maine-based dailies to include their job listings on MaineJobs.com, the employment classified site of MaineToday.com.

Mainebiz recently asked Michaud to explain how the Sun Journal deal happened. The following is an edited transcript.

Mainebiz: Can you walk me through how this started? What was the concept?

Michaud: It really started in mid-2003 when we launched the whole MaineJobs initiative. It's a way to be a lot more aggressive with what we feel needs to be the best employment site in Maine. And we have done a number of things towards that: We pumped [the site] full of editorial content, useful advice and information for job seekers, and different tools for employers to make it easier for them to post jobs. We think that one of the major things that brings job seekers in is volume ˆ— just make sure you have the most jobs of any site in Maine.

I imagine it was difficult to get other publications on board. How'd that all work?

There is an organization called the Maine Daily Newspaper Network, which is mostly a vehicle for national advertisers who want to place ads in multiple newspapers. Through that organization, there was some discussion about doing more with employment and doing more to strengthen these other newspapers' standing in that category.

They were aware that we were already being pretty aggressive with MaineJobs.com, and in January we got together to see what we could do with that. We got all the newspapers in the state together ˆ— there's seven daily newspapers, and I think everyone but one was there. We proposed the idea that we could do a couple of things to meet their needs as well as strengthen MaineJobs.com. It enables [publishers] to better serve their advertisers. And [other newspapers] have a much bigger database of jobs available to users.

What papers are involved?

Currently the Lewiston Sun Journal. We're still in discussion with everybody else.

This seems like a pretty novel approach ˆ— how'd you come up with this idea?

We didn't invent this model. If you look to BostonWorks, from Boston.com [the online home of the Boston Globe], they have broadened [their reach] to a couple of newspapers that are not affiliated with their company. In a way, that made it easier for us to get our arms around, because they were already doing it and you could actually look at how it played out in different markets.

Will this arrangement help MaineToday.com's bottom line?

The terms are probably not something I can discuss in detail. But I can say that basically this is not a major line of business for us. For MaineToday to bring the other newspapers in, we're not looking to make this into a big profit center. The revenue share that we get from it is enough to support the system and to support the promotion that we put into it and things like that, but our interest is to build that big database. That's our selfish interest, and we think we deliver something to [the other newspapers] in exchange.

Could something like this have happened 10 years ago?

No. No question about it. And the reason is that 10 years ago newspapers really had a ˆ— you know, it's hard to call it a monopoly, but they had a very strong position in the community, or a deeply dug position in the community in terms of how people would find employees and how people would find a job. You'd pick up the Sunday paper and you'd look for a job. Since then, we've seen more publications coming out. Lots of industries have very strong industry-based job boards [online] that aren't even in the local market. So the competition for readership and revenue both locally and nationally is a lot stronger than it was 10 years ago. So this is something that's coming up from market forces.

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