NYTIMES ANNOUNCES IT WILL REDUCE THE NUMBER OF LIES AND THE AMOUNT OF CLASSIFIED DATA IT PUBLISHES EACH DAY

BY MAKING THE PAPER SMALLER. 1.5 INCHES NARROWER:

The reduction in the size of its pages would mean a loss of 11 percent of the space devoted to news, but the newspaper plans to add pages to make up for about half of that loss.

''That's a number that I think we can live with quite comfortably,'' Executive Editor Bill Keller was quoted as saying. ''The smaller news space would require tighter editing and putting some news in digest form.''

WE SHOULD BE GRATEFUL FOR EVEN SMALL THINGS.