The Cary-based company eliminated some jobs earlier this year, and more cuts will be coming, said spokesman Tyler Gronbach.

Gronbach declined to say how many positions already have been cut and said the scope of future cuts hasn't been decided. Nor is there a timetable for additional cutbacks.

"When you're in a down economic period, you have to look at ways to decrease expenses," Gronbach said. He added that the job cuts are part of a broader effort to trim costs.

Donnelley has more than 4,000 workers, including 600 in the Triangle.

Nearly half of its employees are in sales, which is one area Donnelley isn't looking to reduce. "We have to continue to service our advertisers," Gronbach said.

The cutbacks come in the wake of a perfect storm that has hit Donnelley hard: a gloomy earnings outlook, a decision to scrap plans for issuing its first-ever dividend and, most ominously, a free-falling stock.

Moreover, although Donnelley executives contend the company's fortunes will turn around when the economy does, some analysts believe the company's problems are more ingrained. They contend that with advertisers increasingly shifting their spending to the Internet, the decline of the yellow pages business has begun.

Donnelley has been pushing to generate more revenue online -- including sales of online yellow pages ads and last year's $345 million acquisition of Business.com, which companies use to search for services, vendors and potential customers. But most of its revenue still comes from selling print ads.

Donnelley shares closed Friday at $5.14, unchanged. The shares have plummeted 86 percent since the beginning of the year.

Donnelley has $10.1 billion in debt, the result of a series of acquisitions, which is putting pressure on the stock, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. told Bloomberg News.

"This is not the market environment to have a highly leveraged position," said analyst Mark Bacurin.