Don:

I happen to be out of town and am reading other papers as your headline error correction was made and was glad to see you responded so quickly.

This observation is based only on an impression but I think Mondays are a particularly mistake-prone day for your paper. Could it be the staff lacks adequate supervision on Sundays?

Busted! We are so busted.

Some of the things we do here involve smoke and mirrors. On Sundays in particular, it’s a pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain operation.

Well, this reader from Pendleton and another reader, a teacher, pulled back the curtain and saw what we didn’t want anyone to see. We produce the Monday paper with a skeletal staff: one reporter, one photographer, two people on our news copy desk and two on our sports desk.

Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and when you play with fire, you get burned. Three weeks ago, as I’m sure you’ll recall, we had a whopper of a headline mistake on our front page.

Headline mistakes of the scale we made recently are unacceptable. You deserve better. So what can we do?

We can add staffing on Sunday, but that would mean a subtraction on another night, and that would cause problems.

Therefore, on Monday, we will raise the curtain on Plan B.

We will scale down the Monday paper to a level more manageable for our level of staffing.

This is your notice. Don’t call us Monday and tell us half of your paper is missing.

Here’s what you will notice:

Instead of four sections, we will print the paper in two sections. We will consolidate news in the “A” section. Sports, classified advertising and TV listings will fill the “B” section.

Instead of 28 pages, we will print 20 pages. We will eliminate the Local cover page, the Life cover page, a Sports page, the Business page, a second HomeTowner page and a few other general pages.

Relax. Most of the features you love won’t go away, but you might want to use the index. Sharon Randall’s column, for instance, will appear on the page with the daytime and late-night TV listings. Obituaries, the crossword puzzle, Dr. Gott, comics, lottery numbers, Straight Talk, weather … they will all be there.

If “People in the News” doesn’t make the cut, will you cancel your subscription? Can you live one day without knowing what Britney or Paris are up to?

A few features will find new homes. “Ambushed” will move to our Life page on Sundays. The Dave Ramsey column will move to our Business section on Sundays.

Is this the big change I was alluding to in a column a few weeks ago? Not even close. This is what I would call a small, temporary adjustment.

A much more radical change is a few months away.

We’re not ready to let anyone peek behind that curtain … yet.