Farewell to a print dinosaur

A relic from the distant past showed up on the front porch last week: A telephone book.

For readers under a certain age, allow me to explain. Once upon a time — oh, about 20 years ago — each house had a big, ugly box screwed into one of its walls or perched on an end table. This box had a large dial that looked somewhat like the inside of a grapefruit.

Instead of eating it, though, we would stick our index fingers into the parts where the fruit would be and rotate the dial, which allowed us to place calls to people or businesses that were too far away to drive to directly. This was a primitive telephone, although we were too ignorant back then to know it was primitive, so we just called it a telephone.

These big, ugly boxes weren’t mobile like the phones we carry in our pockets or stick into our ears today, and they weren’t connected to a 24/7 information source that could find any number instantly. Oh, you could use your index finger to dial “0” and talk to grumpy operators on a crackling line that made them sound like Radar O’Reilly addressing the 4077th via public-address system, but most of us didn’t because, paradoxically, dialing “0” cost money.

Instead, we used that telephone book I mentioned earlier. It listed residential numbers so we could find the name of our secret crush, work up courage for days and days, call and promptly hang up when she came to the line. (Sorry, had a bad case of the autobiographies there.)

The telephone book also listed area businesses. Lots and lots of area businesses. With big, full-color ads, each one trying to outshine and outshout the competition: plumbers, attorneys, car mechanics, and strip clubs. OK, maybe not strip clubs, unless they were New York strip-steak clubs. These ads were in a special part of the book called the Yellow Pages. I bet you can guess why.

When I grew up and took a job selling newspaper advertising, the Yellow Pages were the Great Satan. We lowly newspaper advertising reps would travel from business to business, week to week, peddling the glories of black-and-white newsprint (such as they were), while the Yellow Page salespeople would ride into town once a year in their Mercedes and Lexuses (Lexi?), wearing three-piece suits and impeccably coiffed hairstyles, their wrists dripping with gold, and wine and dine our customers and most of their budgets. In a market where familiarity bred contempt, I was among the most contemptible, a walking pariah with a briefcase.

But how the worm has turned in the 21st century. The explosion of the digital information age has freed us from that box on the wall and put our phones wherever we are. Similarly, the ability to search for information instantly — our cars, in line at the grocery store, in the flooding basement when the pipe bursts and it’s awfully inconvenient to swim for the steps and go fish out the phonebook from a desk upstairs — has freed us from the tyranny of the Yellow Pages.

Rejoice, my children, rejoice.

Now I’m not denying that the information explosion hasn’t affected newspapers, too. Many people believe they can find out everything they need by following the breaking news that flashes on their phones or by visiting a variety of websites through the day. And this mindset is definitely hurting the bottom line of the newspaper industry.

But here’s why newspapers aren’t ready to go the way of the buggy whip or the transistor radio just yet: In small communities, we are still the only medium that will cover local government, run photos of the prom king and queen, and give scores for the little league tournament at the corner park.

Sure, lots of people are posting some of that same stuff on Twitter and Facebook, but a reader who wants it all — or even a good portion of it — would have to follow (ital.) a lot (end ital.) of people to get it. It would be a full-time endeavor, so much so that the reader might be tempted to hire somebody to assemble it all in one convenient place. Which — ahem! — is the newspaper.

Meanwhile, when I saw the phone book on my porch, I paused a moment to reflect on nearly defunct endeavors and their high-powered salespeople. I wondered what they were selling today. Maybe medical equipment. I pondered this on the short walk from the porch to the recycle bin, where I deposited the phonebook without even opening it.

A moment’s silence, please, for a print dinosaur, thrashing about in an inky tarpit and sinking fast. Farewell, and godspeed.


This originally ran in June 2015. In the seven years since, printed newspapers have damn near joined phone books in the obsolescence pile.