Tiger, Joe, Byron and Katie

Let's start with sports. As any golfer knows, Tiger Woods' streak of making 142 consecutive cuts stretching back to February 1998 was broken last week at the Byron Nelson Championship. (Mr. Nelson's 11 consecutive wins on the tour is similar to Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hit streak in that neither will ever be broken.)

And how about Katie Brownell? The only girl and an all-star since she was nine in her upstate New York little league., Katie pitched a perfect game, striking out 18 straight opponents. That's a more perfect game than Don Larson pitched in 1956, and he wasn't batting .714 like Katie is.

So our client asks a good question and an important one. The easy answer is Yes. Yellow Pages publishers, like newspapers and broadcasters, are most certainly losing revenue because people are turning to the Internet for their directional media needs. But please don't ask me to be too specific because all we can do is estimate.

Next week our Global Yellow Pages report: The Kelsey Group's Outlook and Forecast is going to be published. (Major pieces of it are already available to customers.) That report has over 500 pages of very detailed information presented in both a macro and a micro approach. That is, we cover markets in the aggregate and we provide specific details about every major company in the Yellow Pages community. Compiling the numbers is hard, and we are pleased to showcase the Tiger, Joe, Byron and Katie of the Yellow Pages industry.

The harder part is the direction and the velocity of change. Sports analysts have to live with their predictions til the next game. We hear about our forecasts for years. We'll accept the accountability.