More Trouble for Newspapers: Will Yahoo Dump HotJobs?

Opening up my local Sunday newspaper the other day, the one that's been on a serious diet, I was confronted with one of the key dilemmas facing the entire media industry: How can any old-new partnership possibly work?

There it was: Yahoo! hotjobs on newsprint, looking flat as a worn-out pancake. It was gray, uninviting, a relic of a bygone era even though the content was supplied by the first (or second) largest website on the planet.

After doing what I always do with this section, which is to recycle it, I turned to Craigslist on my laptop for a reality check. It was fairly bursting with life, time-dated new offers as hypertext links as easy to follow as click, click, click.
The first product felt like work, one of weekend projects I'd been putting off. The other felt like an eVite notice of an exciting party I'd like to attend. There simply is no doubt which platform is winning.

Last night, news broke that Yahoo may be looking to unload HotJobs. This report, though not yet confirmed by Yahoo, has to send a shudder through the boardrooms of the almost 800 newspapers that make up the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, because those co-branded job listings, however flat and uninviting to my eyes, are a driving force behind this largest of any old-new media alliances.

Stay tuned about this one. Competitors like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com may try to fill the gap if HotJobs is scuttled or sold off to a company with less reach than Yahoo, which given Yahoo's size is of course almost inevitable.

Then, facing falling ad revenues across the board, newspapers may begin to flee the Consortium, which would simply be more bad news for all parties involved.