AT&T Advertising & Publishing saw a 3.3 percent first-half revenue decline, to US$2.82 billion. Part of the decline reflects the sale of the L.M. Berry operation to Local Insight Media, and the resulting lost revenues. That deal closed early in the second quarter. AT&T reported that its Yellowpages.com revenues grew 40.2 percent in the second quarter, compared with 41.1 percent in the first quarter. Based on its strong online growth rate, TKG estimates that AT&T’s print revenues declined more than 6 percent in the first half of the year.

This result underscores the importance of AT&T’s emerging multiplatform business, which ties in print, YPC, SEM, mobile search and the U-verse IPTV platform.

TKG recently conducted an extensive interview with AT&T Advertising & Publishing CEO Frank Jules, who talked about how AT&T is positioned to move from a print-dominated business to one that is genuinely leads based and multiplatform.

We will post a summary and audio clips from that interview soon. Jules will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Directional Media Strategies event, Sept. 15-17 in Atlanta.

Second-quarter earnings have begun trickling out, with more to come later this week and into next week. Yell Group will report its first-quarter 2009 earnings tomorrow, and PagesJaunes posted its first-half results Friday. BNP Paribas analyst Sami Kassab has estimated that Yell will report 1 percent organic growth for the quarter, while PagesJaunes will show a 3.8 percent climb. Both are expected to show declines in print in their flagship markets. Kassab is also slated to speak at DMS.

Next week we will hear from Idearc Media and R.H. Donnelley, both of which will be expected to show progress in stabilizing their businesses.

Last week, the Swedish publisher Eniro announced its first-half results, showing continued softness in print. In Sweden, Eniro’s largest market, organic “offline” revenues declined 8 percent in the first half. Offline was down 14 percent in Norway. The second-quarter call marked the debut of Eniro’s new CEO, Jesper Karrbrink.

The Kelsey Report will produce summaries of these results as they occur and in August will issue an overall summary of the industry first-half 2008.