Not so long ago, if you wanted to find a tenant for your apartment, sell a used car or hire someone to fill a job, you'd place a classified ad in a newspaper. It'd cost you, but how else could you reach a broad audience?

No longer. The Internet has changed everyone's world, and it has caused this stream of cash on which our business relied to all but evaporate.

There are other factors, but that's the big one that is changing the way we operate -- and the big reason The News & Observer took the painful step this week of cutting its work force by 70 jobs, 8 percent of the total.

Briefly, here's how the cuts will affect our readers in Durham.

On the bright side, our Durham-based staff remains intact, as does our commitment to serving Durham readers -- with daily stories in The N&O, with The Durham News every weekend, and with newsobserver.com around the clock.

Soon, however, we will stop publishing a Western Triangle edition of The N&O from Tuesday through Saturday. In that edition, we run more stories about Durham and Orange counties, and fewer stories about Wake than our Raleigh readers see.

Eliminating the west edition is a big money-saver, but the reality is that there will be less news about Durham in the daily paper; stories will be fewer, shorter, and generally played less prominently.

We're still working out the details, but I'm guessing that a larger number of our stories will run online only. And some that we now steer to the daily N&O will run in The Durham News instead.

It's not ideal, but it's the hand we've been dealt, and we'll play it as best we can.