Vocal Voices

Yellow Pages.

The print run ends this year, after 51 years. It's the digital age, you see.

I have not had a new copy for about five years, nor have I had a Thomson local. I had thought nothing of them till I saw the headline on, where else, the Internet.

Like a lot of other things, the Yellow Pages is no longer considered to be necessary.
We haven't used them for years. Not now we have the Internet.

I do wonder, though, if the time will come when some cataclysmic occurrence renders the
WWW inoperative, and mankind will regret having placed too much reliance on it. It only
requires a magnetic eruption from the sun to envelope Planet Earth.

We've always had one put through the door (we had one recently) so I always keep a current one, thinking it might come in useful...then when a new one comes through the door I take the 'old' unused one out of the drawer and throw it away.

Haven't had one in years and wouldn't miss it. But Aggers has a point - what happens when tech fails for some reason and we cannot access all the data we have stored; with nothing in writing

JoM wrote:We've always had one put through the door (we had one recently) so I always keep a current one, thinking it might come in useful...then when a new one comes through the door I take the 'old' unused one out of the drawer and throw it away.

Exactly what we do. But I can't remember the last time we actually tried looking something up in one .....

One thing down here is that there seems to be an awful lot of local business directories always coming through the door and most are monthly. Like the YP, once the new one arrived, the old one gets binned.

But the gran'daddy of them all is the weekly "Blackmore Vale Magazine". This is usually over 100 pages, of which 85% are advertising, from big businesses like the famous Harts of Stur (kitchen-ware, country stores, local institution) to small ads ("Looking for experienced person to drive self propelled Claas Forager throughout maize season. Immediate start."). There's also a letters page, editorial, what's on, rural scene, news items, property section, angling, just about everything. It's free if you're a Blackmore Vale resident and £1 to lesser mortals. It's been going for years and years (I remember it from when we lived down here previously) and if you don't get manage to get down to Waitrose and pick one up by 11:30 every Friday, that's it, you'll have missed it for the week - copies go like hot cakes. Indeed, the local Co-op told the BVM that it wanted the magazine to pay them more to stock it at their shops, the BVM called their bluff and stopped supplying the Co-op, cue furious letters and loss of trade at the Co-op ....

We get a monthly brochure, full of local advertising, through the door here as well