The good news is the Sunday edition will feature six more pages of local content with the debut of a new weekly section called Monday Advance.

Unfortunately, this is the result of the suspension of our Monday paper due in large part to a historic economic downturn that has left many businesses and industries resorting to unprecedented cost-cutting measures.

Still, you will receive much of the content from our Monday paper -- it's just that it will be inserted a day early in the Sunday paper, or a day later in the Tuesday paper.

The easy thing would have been to eliminate the content completely, as some other newspapers have done.

But that would not have been in the best interest of our readers.

So several months ago we decided to create a special section and call it Monday Advance because nearly all of the content in the section is currently in the Monday paper.

For example, our popular Farm & Garden section will still take up two pages with stories, photos and reader-submitted items.

The regular Monday editorial page, which features Katherine Heerbrandt's column, will also be in this new section.

And those of you who are avid readers of Dear Abby, horoscopes, TV listings and the Sudoku puzzle won't be disappointed. These regular features will also appear in the Monday Advance section.

The front page of Monday Advance will include City Hall reporter Adam Behsudi's "City Notes" column and our popular "Slice of Life" human interest stories. A new feature called "Frederick 's Most Wanted," which debuted two weeks ago, will also be featured on the front page of Monday Advance at least twice per month.

"Deal of the Day" will also be a fixture in this new section, so readers can still take advantage of free offers or price discounts on a variety of items offered by local businesses.

At the same time, the Tuesday paper will become larger.

That's because we needed to move the regular Monday comics and crossword puzzle into Tuesday's paper because of contractual issues with our vendors. This means there will be two full pages of comics and two crossword puzzles in the Tuesday paper.

We will also be allotting additional space for sports, lotteries and obituaries.

It's true that other popular features, such as the weather map, will be eliminated. And some readers have asked us how we are going to handle national sporting events on Sundays, such as professional football, baseball and NASCAR.

The short answer to the sports question is that these scores and highlights can still be found on our website at www.fredericknewspost.com and we will still have coverage of these sporting events in our Tuesday paper.

Of course, I would prefer that we would continue publishing the Monday paper, and we probably will resume doing so someday when the economy turns around.

But until then, this seems to be the best solution. The alternative was to raise the price of the paper.

It wasn't an easy decision.

But it was one that was made after much deliberation and with our readers in mind.

Terry Headlee is the managing editor of The Frederick News-Post. He can be reached by e-mail at theadlee@newspost.com or by phone at 240-215-8630.