You read all about it in Romenesko or the trade press when news organizations cut staff. Sometimes the general public hears about it from the news organization itself. Economize, though, by canceling a supplemental wire service, say the New York Times News Service or Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, and seldom is attention called to it. Call it the stealth cuts.

The silent treatment prevails even though readers can be shortchanged more by loss of such major sources of information than by some staff reductions. Newsroom head counts are common, and can be revealing, but at best they provide a partial, and inadequate, picture of what is happening to the nation’s press. It’s a disservice, therefore, to fail to report when a supplemental news service is dropped.

Coverage of local news suffers most when reporters and copy editors are let go. Cancel a supplemental service and readers are deprived primarily of expert national and international reporting. Recall that it was Knight Ridder’s news service (now McClatchy) that broke vital ground en route to the Iraq war. The local daily I read regularly no longer carries either the New York Times or LA Times-Washington Post News services, and it shows. Missing from the paper, for one example, is the informed coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court by Linda Greenhouse of the Times, not to mention the wealth of exclusive stories by staffers from what are arguably the country’s three best newspapers.

Al Leeds, who heads the LA Times-Washington Post News Service, told me “newspapers that used to have New York Times News Service, LA Times-Washington Post and Knight Ridder Tribune (now McClatchy Tribune) now have one or two of these, no longer all three. Gannett has been the most aggressive in cutting supps.” Laurence M. Paul, executive editor of the New York Times News Service, agrees there has been that kind of shrinkage. Leeds’s service charges smaller papers, with circulations of 19,000 or so, $200 a month. It would cost a paper like the Des Moines Register (daily circulation 147,000) in the “single-digit thousands” monthly.

An editor might figure she could hire a copy editor or reporter for that money (or let it drop to the bottom line) and readers would not know the difference. After all, how many readers inspect the tiny type that discloses the identity of the news service that supplied a particular story? When I asked Carolyn Washburn, the Register’s editor, what kind of feedback she had when her paper recently quit taking the LA Times-Washington Post service, she said, “We didn’t get any comments or calls.”

She might have if the paper had publicized the demise of the service. It didn’t disclose, either, the cancellation of the New York Times service when it was dropped several years ago. The passing of the Times meant loss to the Register opinion pages of such high-value columnists as Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd, whose columns ran frequently. Such complaints as there were initially are heard now only “here and there,” according to editorial page editor Carol Hunter.

It would be instructive if editors explain to readers the trade-offs they face and why they choose as they do when their papers eliminate something as major as a news service. It would be a mistake to assume that the absence of reader complaints means approval. It could mean, on the contrary, that readers no longer have come to expect as much from their local paper. That would be a danger signal ignored at every newspaper’s peril.