The City of Syracuse is about to win a new distinction. The only major city in the state to not have a home-delivered daily newspaper, seven days a week. YNN's Bill Carey says it's all because of new changes being announced by the Syracuse Post-Standard.

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SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- There was a time when people in Syracuse had their choice of newspapers, day and night. But the city changed and those newspapers began to combine. Two, the Standard and the Post, would produce a paper called the Post-Standard, the only daily journal that survives in the 21st century. But that survival is now in question, as readers turn away from print and toward the internet.

“We are in a desperate fight to save the Post-Standard,” said Stephen A. Rogers, Syracuse Post-Standard Publisher.

Rogers has been the editor and publisher of the Post-Standard for 32 years. The old model of doing things, he says, no longer works.

“If we don't do anything, the Post-Standard faces extinction. Perhaps in six or seven or eight years. What's the reason for that? The digital revolution,” Rogers said.

The paper says it will cut back on seven-day-a-week home delivery of the paper starting January 1st. Starting then, papers will only be delivered on Tuesday, Thursdays and Sundays.

The changes at the Post-Standard will eventually lead to two operations. One aimed at the internet. The other to printing a newspaper.

Rogers said, “The two new companies, they will start operating on January 1st of next year, will be smaller than they are today, the number of employees will be smaller. But I'm happy to say we will have as many reporters, if not more, on the street on January 1st than we have today”

“I would characterize it more as an inevitability than a surprise,” said Steve Davis.

Davis, a former editor at USA Today, now chairs the newspaper department at Syracuse University's Newhouse School. He's not so sure this type of compromise is the long-term answer.

“In adjusting to this new world, they've tried to preserve what they had before and innovate and evolve at the same time. What they probably need to do is forget the old and innovate and evolve completely and to their core,” Davis said.

Rogers isn't giving up yet on that old style paper. He hopes he's found a formula for survival.

“I want to see the Post-Standard go on for a long, long time. And this is a way to do it,” Rogers added.

While offering home delivery of the Post-Standard on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, the paper says it will, for the time being, still offer a smaller version of the paper seven days a week for newsstand sales. That's only in Onondaga County.

The company will not say how long that effort will continue.