The Raleigh, North Carolina News & Observer offered voluntary buyouts to 320 employees, including all full time newsroom staff, in an effort to gain ground amid an advertising landslide, The News & Observer reported Thursday.

The number being offered buyouts at the newspaper, owned by Sacramento, Calif.-based McClatchy Co., is about 40 percent of total employees.

“We continue to tighten up in all areas of the operation based on what we're seeing,” Publisher Orage Quarles III told The News & Observer. “The market is going to continue to be soft for longer than anyone had expected and, certainly, had hoped.”

Cutting employees is not the only step the newspaper is taking to offset the slump in advertising. The paper will also cut about 10 pages from the paper each week beginning in October, by combining the Travel section with Arts & Living on Sundays, merging Friday's entertainment section into the Life section and switching the television guide from a quarter-fold to a 16-page tabloid, The News & Observer reported.

The News & Observer's audience continues to grow online, but those audiences are not enough to make up for lost ad revenue. In addition, McClatchy went into debt in 2006 to buy the Knight Ridder newspaper company, but is struggling to pay the debt back due to the poor economy, low ad sales and a shift to online media, where audiences are larger, but revenues are much smaller.