No sooner had we written that an acquisition by online recruiting firm Monster Worldwide Inc. [MNST] might make it more attractive to a potential buyer did we run across this rumor courtesy of Seeking Alpha that News Corp. [NWS] was offering to buy the company for $4.8 billion.

Speculation of a potential buyout of Monster is nothing new -- there's been talk that chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi was brought in last April to prep the company for a sale. And there's little doubt that someone might have interest in buying Monster, whose stock reached a 52-week low on Jan. 4.

The rumored $4.8 billion price tag on the company is a robust 30%-plus premium to Monster's $28.34 share price on Wednesday. Yet that pales to what the company was worth when Iannuzzi came aboard. In May, an analyst said Monster could fetch more than $50 a share, or $6.5 billion, for a financial buyer (that was before the credit crunch deep-sixed big LBOs, of course) and "significantly more" for a strategic buyer. 

Althugh Monster shares have tailed since then, the online career business is cyclical, and some of the weakness in the stock may be attributable to investors bailing in advance of what was lining up as a few soft quarters. Unless Iannuzzi sees dire times ahead and thinks $4.8 billion is as good as he's going to get, we can't imagine him selling Monster for far less than it was worth when he joined the company. - David Shabelman

See Jan. 4 post from Tech Confidential
See Jan. 8 post from Notable Calls 
See April 12 story from TheDeal.com