In case you missed the news, Julia Roberts didn`t bother to tell Kiefer Sutherland that their nuptials were canceled. Her manager did. Meanwhile, rowdy actor Nicholas Cage was sued for trashing his $3,500-a-month Hollywood apartment.
The suds are even thicker on ”General Hospital,” where Lucy was horrified to wake up in bed with Scott, who`s now blackmailing her. And then there`s this item from the real world of doctors and nurses: Plantar warts
(not to be confused with corns or plantar calluses) occur mostly on the soles of the foot and grow inward, due to the pressures of body weight.
These bulletins come not from the usual reliable media sources-newspapers, magazines, TV or radio-but via the audiotex services of your telephone directory. Whether they`re called ”Touch Four” (published by DonTech) or ”Talking Fingers” (Directories America), the various hot lines keep touchtoners up to date not only on Hollywood gossip, soap opera plots and medical news but on weather forecasts, horoscopes, baseball scores, film and book reviews, TV schedules, Top 10 albums, concert times, sports trivia, and many other vital matters.
For those who haven`t browsed through the yellow (or blue or green) pages of your phone directory lately, the 1991 editions may hold a few surprises. Besides voice-information numbers and listings for nuts-and-bolts products like ”Air Recovery and Purification Equipment” and ”Wild Bird Feed,” the directories now routinely furnish consumers with such basics as bus routes and first aid instruction, bike trails and seating charts for Wrigley Field and the Rosemont Horizon.
Despite its doorstop size and sprawling cast of characters, the telephone directory may never qualify as a blockbuster or a big read, in a league with Stephen King. But for all the cataclysmic changes in the telecommunications industry, the free directory remains one of America`s biggest bargains. And over the last decade, the utilitarian monolith has evolved into a
comparatively livelier, more colorful book.
According to Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer and best-selling author (”Information Anxiety”), the yellow pages-or classified sections-of phone directories have become ”our guidebook to everything.” If Wurman is right, then he has surely been one of the architects of that evolution. In 1986, Pacific Bell of California hired him to overhaul its yellow pages, a task to which he brought many of the innovations that distinguish the urban guidebooks published by his Access Press.
For many prospective users, the yellow pages have traditionally been a source of great frustration, said Wurman, during a phone interview from his Manhattan studio, where he retreated after the expiration of his contract with Pacific Bell. ”They can`t find what they`re looking for because the headings are obscure and have gotten out of control, so they say, `Oh, I give up.` ”
To ease those frustrations, Wurman expanded and reorganized the index to Pacific Bell`s yellow (or Smart) pages. In addition to the standard alphabetical listings, he grouped the services and products into trendier generic categories (such as ”Party Planning” and ”Get-Aways”).
He also turned the front of the book into a resource guide (”Places to go/Things to do/And much more!”), with a calendar of events and lists of specialty shops, studio tours and other local attractions. Most of these new and rehabbed features were supported by stylized graphics and maps.
Out of white paper
Even though the publishers of the nation`s other directories haven`t rushed to duplicate Wurman`s new improved format for Pacific Bell, they have been trying to make their product better-and more profitable-not only with
”talking” yellow pages but also with discount coupons for advertisers`
products, slimmer books and similar novelties.
Meantime, the folks at Pacific Bell have toned down and
”decontemporized” their Smart pages since Wurman`s departure, substituting more homogenized illustrations and reverting to a less avant-garde format.
Asked about their redesign of Wurman`s redesign, Amity Hotchkiss, a communications manager for Pacific Bell in San Francisco, explained: ”We`ve made incremental improvements and gone in a different direction based on marketing needs. We`ve taken the content and graphics and further improved on what he did.”
Even in their altered form, Wurman`s Smart pages represent the most extensive revision since the first telephone directory was published, in New Haven, Conn., in 1878, two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Five years later, a directory appeared with its classified section printed on yellow pages, reportedly because the printer ran out of white paper.
During modern times, sections of the phone directories have acquired blue, pale green, pink and even turquoise hues, to separate the community-information guides or the audiotex sections from the white-page listings. The addition of red and blue ink has further brightened the conventional black-and-yellow look of the classified ads. But graphically, most telephone directories still belong to the age of party lines and human switchboard operators.
A semiofficial reason for publishers` resistance to changing the look of their directories came from Edward G. Blackman, executive director of the Yellow Pages Publishers Association, headquartered in Troy, Mich. ”Why tamper with a product that is universally accepted and used?” he said. ”If you moved from Manhattan to Dodge City, except for some regional difference in headings, you`d be using the very same book.”
Call for specialization
But it might not be the same book that`s used in certain Chicago suburbs- those served by Yellow Pages One, a year-old company that publishes four small directories, slightly larger than a deluxe paperback novel and designed for women. ”Our surveys show that 90 percent of the calls are originated by women,” said Harry Dubbs, founder of Yellow Pages One, ”and women love the smaller book.”
There are other signs that the age of behemoth phone books may be nearing an end. Directories America, a Kansas City company that publishes 45 books in the Chicago suburbs, plans to crash the urban market with undersized directories that can be mailed, rather than hand-delivered, to residents of Lincoln Park and the Near North Side.
In other areas, the directory industry has already undergone a major change, corresponding to the general upheaval in the telecommunications business since the 1984 breakup, or divestiture, of the AT&T monopoly. Along with solicitations from rival long-distance companies, customers were deluged with phone books.
”When the breakup came, everybody hopped on the bandwagon,” said Joseph Weiss, the Midwest sales director for Directories America. ”They had grand ideas, but the mortality rate was quite high.”
As an independent in the Chicago area, Directories America, a division of United Telecom (also the parent company of U.S. Sprint), has high-powered competition from the utility publisher, DonTech, a post-divestiture merger of Donnelley Directory and Ameritech, the regional company that provides phone service to five Midwestern states.
In the immediate metropolitan area, DonTech publishes 145 directories-not only the unwieldy 2,000-page Chicago white and yellow pages but less cumbersome suburban phone books as well.
For the present, DonTech has a near monopoly in the city, getting only minimal competition from yellow pages aimed at women, Hispanics and other specialty markets. A directory catering to children, Little Yellow Pages, will debut during the Christmas holidays, a portion of the proceeds going to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.
Toll and profit free
These small specialty publishers may seize increasingly bigger shares of the market, if the Women in Business Yellow Pages can be considered a model. Ida Bialik, who founded the Chicago company with her sister, Joyce Pollakoff, said the company`s revenue and the number of advertisers have grown significantly in the five years it has been around. It now has sister publications in 18 cities.
Though the Women in Business Yellow Pages has a cover price of $9, the majority of copies are distributed free by advertisers and corporate sponsors, such as the Harris Bank and WBBM radio. ”We have a very targeted circulation,” Bialik said. ”It`s not dropped on anyone`s doorstep.”
Aiming for far larger and less selective audiences, the big publishers not only bombard doorsteps with directories but offer such revolutionary technological services as ”Talking Fingers” and the ”Touch Four” sections, through which customers can get movie schedules, health tips and financial reports, each for the price of a local call.
”It`s not a 900 deal, where you pay 50 cents or a dollar a minute,”
said Directories America`s Weiss. Even though the caller gets a brief commercial, along with a baseball score or a traffic advisory, the
”electronic voice service is not a moneymaker for us,” he said. ”But it`s been a good ticket because it endears us to advertisers.”
At DonTech, where ”Touch Four” has been a more limited experiment, William Cooke, vice president of planning and marketing, reported that the
”payback in terms of advertising revenue is zero, and the usage is very small. But this is an investment in the future.”
For now, Cooke said he has no ”clear idea of what tomorrow`s product is going to look like,” though he did refer a caller to the Springfield directory. That book features a map of the city`s largest shopping mall, along with phone numbers that provide recorded messages about stores` sales and promotions.
”This is really a visual society,” Cooke said. ”People want much more information and they want it quicker. We want them to know that there`s a real easy way to get a lot of data and to get it real fast, and that`s the phone book.”
