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Effective Monday, the News & Record's opinion pages will change to fit the new realities of the newspaper business.

Faced with less room in the printed newspaper on those days, we will eliminate the Second Opinion page on Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays. On the remaining four days of the week, the Second Opinion page will continue to publish.

To accommodate these changes, the Doonesbury comic strip, which traditionally has run Mondays through Saturdays on the Second Opinion page, will move to the News & Record's comics page seven days a week.

This was not an easy call, but a necessary one in a more and more challenging economic climate for newspapers and for the companies we depend on for advertising revenue. Less advertising means less space for printed content.

Even so, we will work to maintain the quality of our pages and to preserve our sections' most popular features.

Content that regularly runs on the opinion pages will not disappear although it may move. In some cases it will shift to the main editorial page. In others, it will find a new home on another day of the week.

More on that later.

In addition, the Sunday Ideas section will drop from six pages to four. A mainstay of that section, the weekly Books page, will be eliminated.

We will no longer publish book reviews, but book-related coverage will move to the Life section, which will feature occasional stories on major book releases and local authors. In addition, arts reporter Dawn Kane will cover some book-related news in her "People in the Arts" column. Book signings and lectures will appear in the weekly Life calendar.

And the Ideas front from time to time will feature interviews with authors who address pertinent social and public policy issues.

As for the national and local columns that appear regularly in the News & Record, all of them will continue to run, based on the following new schedule:

Mondays: Leonard Pitts Jr. will run on the main editorial page.

Tuesdays: Thomas Friedman will appear on the main editorial page.

Wednesdays: Doug Clark, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker and Leonard Pitts will run on the Second Opinion page.

Thursdays: Thomas Friedman, Thomas Sowell, George Will and Maureen Dowd will appear on the Second Opinion page.

Fridays: Rosemary Roberts, Gene Owens, Cal Thomas and our roundup of comedians' quips, Night Lines, will appear on the Second Opinion page.

Sundays: The lineup of regular national and local columnists will remain intact. Edward Cone, Charles Davenport Jr., George Will, David Noer and Mike Clark will appear, as will my weekly column in its customary place.

We won't even attempt to pretend that these changes will give you a bigger, better opinion section. They won't. And you know that.

But they will maintain many of the features you've come to depend on and to look forward to over the years.

One consolation to the space squeeze on the printed page is the endless space the Internet provides.

So, we'll redouble our efforts to expand the content we offer online, from our blogs to the video interviews we're conducting with candidates in the races for governor and U.S. Senate.

We will debut a new editorial podcast in September.

We will continue our video interview series, "Newsmaker."

As always, we will continue to invite readers to debate the issues of the day on our letters to the editor blog and to react to each day's editorials on the "Your Voice at the Table" blog.

In the coming weeks, we'll add more online content, including more video and audio to complement printed editorials and columns.

As more readers continue to go to the Web for news and commentary, we're hoping these initiatives will help ease the sting of the space crunch.

We'll continue to run letters to the editor in their usual location, seven days a week.

We will strive to make our daily editorials topical, fair-minded and forthright.

We will continue to publish guest columns from readers and local newsmakers.

With the Nov. 4 election fast approaching, we will make our election commentary as thorough and as compelling as we can, from our coverage of statewide senatorial and gubernatorial races to the Greensboro city bonds.

Toward that end, we are personally interviewing candidates from the top of the North Carolina ballot to the bottom.

In the meantime, some things won't be changing.

These pages still belong to you as much as they do us.

And they remain very much open for the business of civil dialogue and constructive debate. Please join us.