You figured that Monster Worldwide (NASDAQ:MNST) wouldn't let Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) get away with all of the newspaper fun. Yesterday, the parent company behind the popular Monster.com employment-recruiting site announced a deal to beef up the job listings at Community Newspapers.

The online classifieds section at each of Community's 93 daily newspapers, most of them in small markets, will now include co-branded employment listings that feature Monster's online resume builder and salary information guide. 

This isn't the first time Monster has turned to the inksmiths, even though Yahoo! has been getting seemingly all of the headlines, thanks to its similar deals with larger newspaper chains, including McClatchy (NYSE:MNI), E.W. Scripps (NYSE:SSP), and Lee Enterprises (NYSE:LEE). As of last month, the consortium of papers working with Yahoo! totaled 264 publications across 44 states.

Monster may seem to be falling behind, but this morning's deal brings Monster's own reach beyond 200 newspapers. That translates into a potential audience of 7 million readers, covering 12% of the country's daily-newspaper circulation.

The race is on among Monster Worldwide, Yahoo!'s HotJobs.com, and the print media-owned CareerBuilder to land as much local traffic as possible through the popular websites of local papers. It's a race that no company can afford to lose, even if we may never be able to declare an ultimate winner in the relentless quest for people worth hiring.

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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz still subscribes to daily print newspapers, including The Miami Herald and Wall Street Journal, even though he gets most of his news online. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early. The Fool has a disclosure policy.