There's no getting around it: The job cuts and other changes announced by The News & Observer last week mean that readers will be getting less. Specifically:

* Less local news

* Fewer late sports scores and less late-breaking news

* One less page of op-ed opinion each week.

* Less business news.

* All told, 14 fewer pages per week.

Those and some other less noticeable effects are the consequence of the ongoing financial meltdown in the newspaper business that finally caused McClatchy Newspapers, The N&O's parent company, to announce job reductions of 10 percent across its 30 newspapers. McClatchy previously avoided the layoffs that had reduced staffing at most other newspaper companies.

At The N&O, 70 people lost jobs, including 16 full- and part-time employees in the newsroom. It is a sad time for the newspaper and for the people here who will see long-time colleagues leave.

"I'm not happy about getting smaller, and I'm not happy about early deadlines, but I understand the business time that we're in," said John Drescher, executive editor. "We have to adjust to a new time, and this is part of the adjustments."

He said the largest cuts were to the paper's research staff. Only one reporting job and two copy editing jobs were eliminated, he said.

ONE OF THE MAJOR CHANGES WILL BE THE ELIMINATION of two of the four existing daily editions, ending up with a state edition and a single final edition. This will have two noticeable effects: Readers in Durham/Chapel Hill and in Southeast Wake/Smithfield will no longer have editions with news geared to them. Drescher said much of that news will move to the N&O-owned local papers in Chapel Hill, Durham and Smithfield. The final edition of The N&O will become a Triangle edition.

The other effect will be that, to save printing expenses, deadlines will be moved up by about two hours, from 2 a.m. to around midnight. That will make it difficult or impossible to get late sports scores into the paper and to report late news stories, such as late public meetings or late-breaking national or world news.

Orage Quarles III, the N&O's publisher, said the paper will find a way to cover the important stories. "We're going to still cover the big stories," he said. "We're still going to do what we do best. Just because we trimmed jobs doesn't mean we lowered expectations. In fact, we raised them."

Business readers will miss the separate stand-alone Business section. Business news will be combined with the City & State section to save pages. Other newsprint savings will come in the What's Up section and the Monday paper, which will go to a one-page opinion section (a combined editorial/op-ed page will appear that day).

Two other major changes are the combining of the sports and politics staffs of The N&O and sister paper The Charlotte Observer. The two papers' Capitol staffs will be combined into one, reporting to a Raleigh editor, and the sports staffs will become one, reporting to an editor in Charlotte. Also combined will be the two papers' research staffs.

That sports change caused some grumbling, understandably, among the Raleigh sports staff. But Drescher said it makes sense. Both papers cover ACC sports extensively -- often using two reporters writing stories side by side. Combining the staffs frees one of those reporters to write other stories. Charlotte will also bring to N&O readers more coverage of NASCAR and the Carolina Panthers. "I think it enables us to break more news and expand our reach," Drescher said. (Some readers told me they hope it also brings more coverage of Appalachian State and Wake Forest.)

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