Beginning tomorrow, we are making some changes in the layout of the Monday paper.

The A section on Mondays now will include both local and national news, along with the business and opinion pages. Our SoundLife section will have classified advertising pages in the back. Our Sports section will remain unchanged.

Our reason for changing is financial. Newsprint prices have risen 33 percent since the beginning of the year, and we can save expensive newsprint by combining sections. Our goal – while we’re at it – is to make the paper a quicker read at the busy beginning of the workweek while still allowing you to share sections around the breakfast table among readers with different interests.

The front page won’t change much, but will include a “navigation” rail on the left-hand side to help you find your favorite pages in the new format. For your convenience, all the stories from the front page will jump to the back page of the section.

On Page 2, you’ll still find the People column and celebrity birthdays. We’re also moving the popular “Looking Back” historical notes and photograph to that page on Mondays.

Page 3 will mark the beginning of the South Sound local news section. Again for your convenience, none of the stories in this section will jump from one page to another.

Behind the local news, you’ll find the obituaries, followed by the Nation & World pages. The last two pages inside the section will be reserved for our regular Monday business and opinion pages.

You’ll find all the same features we packaged in two sections, now in one. Tomorrow’s combined news section has about the same news space as last week’s A and B sections together.

The SoundLife cover on Mondays will feature stories that hold to the page. Inside, you’ll still find local TV and movie information, puzzles and comics. Classified ads will come next.

This isn’t the first time we’ve combined sections. You may have noticed that several months ago we began putting classified pages in the back of our Business section some days of the week.

Without reducing the amount of business news, we saved on newsprint. Here’s how. Separate sections require an even number of pages – four or six or eight – because we print on the front and the back of each page. On days when we had only, say, three pages of classified ads, we used fillers to spread the content over the four pages required for a stand-alone section. When combined with Business, however, we can put three pages of ads inside the section and not spend expensive newsprint on fillers.

Other newspapers across the country also are combining sections.

We modeled our changes on the newly reconfigured Detroit Free Press, which combined its national and local news sections into one with local news beginning on Page 3. We built our section that way believing that local news – news you can get only from us – takes priority over news from elsewhere. Our sister paper The Olympian recently adopted a similar format.

Other papers are doing it differently. The Chicago Tribune’s newly combined news section puts Nation & World news in front of local coverage. Some papers have folded features pages into their news sections, but we like the idea of one person being able to read the comics or do the crossword puzzle while another person reads the news.

Also beginning Monday, both Seattle papers roll out new section formats.

The Seattle Times began several weeks ago to fold its business pages into the back of its A section. On Monday, editors are combining the metro and features sections into a single section that focuses on all things local, from news to lifestyle and people stories. On Thursday and Friday, they’ll also provide local travel and entertainment sections.

And on Sunday, they’ll go back to a more traditional lineup of sections.

David McCumber, managing editor of the Post-Intelligencer, explained his paper’s new six-day-a-week format like this: “Local news will join national/foreign, weather and our opinion pages in the A section. The B section will include Life and Arts, TV listings, comics, classifieds and our Going Out/Staying In page. The C section will be sports, followed by business.”

“This resectioning does not in itself change our content,” McCumber wrote me. “While other content changes may follow, this is basically the same news and features, organized in a new way. The idea is that we will save newsprint by booking the sections more efficiently.”

Our goal at The News Tribune is the same.

Karen Peterson: 253-597-8434

karen.peterson@thenewstribune.com