PROVIDENCE — The Providence Journal Co. is laying off 31 people — about 4 percent of the company’s total work force — as part of a broader cost-cutting effort by its parent company, A.H. Belo Corp. of Dallas.

Overall, 25 part-time workers and 6 full-time Journal workers are to be laid off, effective today, said Howard G. Sutton, the Journal Co.’s chairman, publisher, president and chief executive officer.

They will receive severance ranging from 2 weeks pay to 35 weeks pay, depending on their years of service, Sutton said.

A.H. Belo announced plans in July to cut $50 million in expenses, partly by reducing the work force at its newspapers in Providence, Dallas, and Riverside, Calif.

The job cuts are the result of a broad restructuring that A.H. Belo said it was implementing as it faces an “unprecedentedly adverse business environment in the newspaper industry.”

A.H. Belo said it planned to eliminate the equivalent of about 500 full-time jobs company wide, representing about 14 percent of its overall work force of about 3,570 employees.

At the time, A.H. Belo said it hoped to achieve the targeted job cuts through voluntary severance offers. If not enough workers agreed to the buyout, the company said it would have to resort to layoffs.

Overall, more than 400 A.H. Belo employees wound up taking the buyout, including 22 at the Providence Journal, 270 at the Dallas Morning News and 120 at the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., but the total was less than sought.

As a result, A.H. Belo is laying off 50 employees at the Dallas Morning News, about 30 at The Press-Enterprise and 31 at the Providence Journal.

They are the latest in a series of job cuts at newspaper companies throughout the country as publishers attempt to cope with declines in advertising revenue — their chief source of revenue — amid a nationwide economic downturn, competition from the Internet, rising printing costs and other factors.

Within the last month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Plain Dealer in Cleveland and a number of other newspapers have either laid off workers or announced layoffs and other staff reductions. Last summer, the Hartford Courant cut its newsroom staff by 25 percent, to about 175 people.

Linda Lotridge Levin, journalism professor at the University of Rhode Island and chair of its journalism department, said that many of the biggest newspapers in the country have been reducing staff, through buyouts and layoffs, for the last year or two. “So the Journal is, if anything, a little bit behind on that,” she said.

The layoffs at the Journal are all from the company’s news-gathering operations. Although the business has had layoffs before, this is believed to be the first time the company has laid off news employees. “This is the first lay off of regularly scheduled employees in news,” Sutton said.

The Journal will continue to have 199 people employed in its news-gathering operation, so it will remain the largest news organization in Rhode Island, Sutton said.

“Even with this reduction in our news-gathering and editing ranks, we still have almost 200 people working in our newsrooms, which is a sizeable commitment to provide our readers with news and information,” Sutton said in an interview at the company’s headquarters on Fountain Street in Providence.

“This is a large, complex manufacturing company, [and] 200 of our 700 employees” are in the news-gathering operation, he said.

Those laid off include copy editors, reporters, newsroom assistants and several managers, said John G. Hill, president of the Providence Newspaper Guild, a union that represents about 320 advertising, news and editorial employees at the Journal Co.

The reduction in staff “is nothing unique,” Hill said. “This is going on throughout the country. We are unfortunately living in a transformational time for the newspaper industry. . . . Their revenues are down and they have to adjust the staff levels,” he said.

The combination of layoffs and buyouts at the Journal means that more than 50 staff members will have left the company over the past month or so, Hill said. “There’s no way it’s going to be the same after that. . . . It’s the end of an era,” he said.

Of the 31 people being laid off, 28 are represented by the Guild, Sutton said, and of those, 25 are part-time. The union’s contract “clearly states that all part-time employees [are] less senior than full-time employees” no matter how long they have served, he said.

The layoffs were all from the Journal’s news operation because “it was more efficient for us to reduce the part-timers in news and restructure the . . . flow of producing the news on a daily basis, ensuring the quality of our journalism and production,” Sutton said.

Asked whether more layoffs will come, he said, “We hope that this will get us to the level of employment that will avoid further staff reductions, but that would depend on the future of the economy.”

Hill said, “I think the message of these layoffs is, we’re going to be looking over our shoulders now and wondering.”

In early September, the Journal company had 763 full-time and part-time employees. By the end of today, the company will have 706 full-time and part-time employees, company officials said.

A.H. Belo last month estimated the expense related to the layoffs company-wide at $2.4 million, which the company said it will record in the three-month period that will end Dec. 31.

The combined work-force reductions company-wide are expected to result in a savings of more than $29 million on an annualized basis, A.H. Belo said.

A.H. Belo is a publicly held media company (AHC: NYSE) whose properties include daily newspapers and a diverse group of Web sites, including www.projo.com.

A.H. Belo also publishes various specialty publications, and owns direct mail and commercial printing businesses. A.H. Belo stock closed yesterday at $3.95 per share, down 22 cents.

ndowning@projo.com