Before the internet, it was a world of word-of-mouth and print media. If you needed something you would ask your neighbours, or strike up a conversation in a pub. If you didn’t know anyone, or weren’t particularly gregarious, you could always turn to classified ads in various publications, such as local newspapers or directories like The Yellow Pages.
Last week saw the final print edition of Time Out London, hit the shops. Now it is no longer. After 54 years, a cultural mainstay of London, many of us will fondly remember thumbing through this magazine. Now it will be completely digital – Thumb it we can no longer do…
Perhaps they are a little late in the game as print editions of other publications went completely digital a long time ago. The hefty Yellow Pages moved to digital in 2017, moving with the times it aptly truncated its name to just Yell. It’s unlikely anyone will reminisce fondly about this doorstop of a thing, because it was a directory, and had nothing particularly scintillating lying within it’s pages. This is unless you were to find it in a hundred years time. Then it might be of historic interest to discover that there were professions such as chimney sweeps, taxi-drivers and solicitors. Yell seemed to spawn a number of copycats as there’s also Yelp, and then The Central Index. A directory benefits from being digital as it has a search facility, allowing you to quickly hone into what you are looking for. The greatest advantage is that people can leave reviews of the businesses that you’re looking for. In the past, using a print directory was hit and miss, to say the least, and the trades were plagued by cowboys.
