Three phone books landed on our front porch this weekend: A thick white pages with residential and business alphabetized listings, a thick, traditional business yellow pages, and a thinner yellow pages focusing on my town. They are sitting in the back corner of our living room while we await bookshelves.

To be honest, they’ll probably sit there all year.

The yellow pages can be quite valuable: Our phone book proved quite useful to me earlier this year when we had no Web connection at home and I needed an emergency plumber on a weekday evening. That was almost five months ago.

But now I have high-speed, wireless Internet access at home. If I need the phone number for the vet, I look it up online. When I need the phone number for our car dealership, I go to their Web site. If I’m looking for a restaurant in a certain neighborhood, I go to our newspaper’s Web site and search, look at reviews, get maps, hours, phone numbers and more.

(I hope, newspaper people, you just had an ‘A-ha!’ moment.)

Newspapers, as a center for local, in-depth information (and with local brand strength, market penetration and more) have a major opportunity here. Some newspapers are already making some serious headway in this area by partnering with local phone companies, small business and their own communities to create robust local directories. For great examples, see ShopMinnesota (from the Minneapolis Star Tribune), The Bakersfield Californian’s InsideGuide (and this Snapshot on it), and the Naples Daily News Restaurant Guide.

There’s no one set model for doing this, but there is a ton of experimenting going on and many successful versions are up and running at newspaper Web sites.

Fortunately (shameless plug warning), NAA published a really good white paper on just this topic earlier this summer. Peter Krasilovsky (who writes the Local Onliner blog, is program director for The Kelsey Group and does a ton of consulting work) wrote "The Newspaper Online Shopping Report: Online Relationships with Retailers." NAA published the paper earlier this summer. Also, Roxanne Oswald from the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote a brief review of it.

At 3 p.m. (ET) August 21, Peter will present an NAA Webinar on this topic. More information on the Webinar will come in the next week or so.