Hello, Sweetheart! Get Me Remake!

By Susan Tifft

California may be the land of health and fitness, but even the well-toned gods and goddesses of the Golden State are respectful when they heft the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times. Swathed in plastic or tied with string, the paper contains an average of 444 ad- and information-packed pages, and most weeks weighs in at more than 4 lbs. On April 7 readers unfurled their papers to find a handsome addition: a redesigned, upscale Sunday magazine bursting with national ads and feature-length stories calculated to showcase the best of the Times's 900 editors, reporters and photographers.

The face-lift of the Sunday Los Angeles Times Magazine is just the latest indication that the once somnolent flagship of the Times Mirror Co. is positioning itself to challenge the nation's most highly regarded newspapers -- the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal -- for visibility, influence and prestige. With a daily circulation of 1.2 million, the L.A. Times is already the largest metropolitan paper in the U.S., outstripping the daily New York Times by 88,000 and the Washington Post by 416,000. Its profits for 1991 are projected to top $110 million, double that of the New York Times. With its frequent scoops, informative graphics and emphasis on analysis of world and national events, the Times is a paper that is improving in dramatic ways.

That was abundantly clear during the Persian Gulf war, when the Times won widespread praise for running hard-hitting stories that clashed with upbeat military assessments. The paper was the first to reveal that most of the munitions used in the war were not smart bombs but unguided ones that all too often missed their target. It also disclosed possible defects in the Bradley fighting vehicle and chronicled a Navy admiral's stepped-up efforts to weed out lesbians. Moreover, at the peak of the crisis, the Times had the financial muscle to put 17 correspondents in the gulf -- five more than the New York Times and seven more than the Washington Post. "They had superlative coverage," says Everette Dennis, executive director of the Gannett Foundation Media Center at Columbia University. "It was imaginative, with a great deal of depth."

With 27 foreign and 13 domestic bureaus, the L.A. Times is well situated to compete aggressively for international and national news. Every Tuesday the paper produces a supplement called World Report that attempts to make sense of foreign affairs with sprightly analytical pieces and bright graphics. To ensure that the Times's voice is heard in Moscow, the paper hand delivers a digest of news and editorials to top-ranking Soviet officials each day.

In the U.S., however, the Times's visibility is still largely confined to the West Coast. The paper is hard to come by outside California, and there is no talk of a national edition. Hence, although the paper maintains a highly respected 57-person bureau in the nation's capital, it is not yet considered by Washington insiders to be in the same must-read category as its three major national competitors. "It's a presence," says Bill Monroe, editor of the Washington Journalism Review. "But it's in the wings because it's not available at the doorstep."

That low profile frustrates Times Washington reporters, who put in a longer day than their peers, owing to the additional three hours of reporting time they gain because of their Pacific-time deadlines. The extra effort frequently translates into journalistic upsets. "We have more drive and ideas than the other papers," declares Washington bureau chief Jack Nelson, who helps promote the paper by appearing regularly on the PBS talk show Washington Week in Review. Indeed, it was Nelson who filed an enterprising story on Dec. 28 asserting -- presciently, as it turned out -- that President Bush would start bombing Iraq soon after the Jan. 15, 1991, deadline for pulling out of Kuwait.

If the Times's new honchos have their way, the paper's lack of recognition up and down the Northeast corridor will not last much longer. The twin engines behind the paper's new thrust are Times Mirror president David Laventhol, 57, who added the title of Times publisher in 1989, and Shelby Coffey III, 45, who arrived as deputy associate editor in 1986, via the Washington Post and the Dallas Times-Herald, and was named editor and executive vice president in 1988. Together the West Coast transplants have set themselves a daunting task: transforming a respectable, gray newspaper into a journal that appeals to readers in ethnically diverse Los Angeles and its sprawling environs while also capturing an elite national audience of opinion makers. "The philosophy of what we have been doing," says Coffey, "has been to look at each element of the paper and say, 'How could we make it better? Are there new approaches to be taken?' "

That innovative spirit is readily apparent. To make the paper more appealing to younger readers with television-era attention spans, Coffey began slashing the long, unfocused stories that were once the Times's trademark. To encourage reporters to concentrate on the craft of writing, he breathed new life into "Column One," a Page One spot that each day showcases an example of what Coffey calls "literary journalism."

Last fall, in concert with publisher Laventhol, Coffey freshened the paper's look. The overhauled design was promoted in ads as a "new, faster-format Los Angeles Times." Today most pieces carry quick-scan subheads that summarize the story's main points, and the paper's second page features an illustrated index with bite-size nuggets that inform readers what each story is about and guide them to the appropriate page.

Coffey also brought the skills of a hands-on manager to a newsroom that badly needed it. At times there had been so little coordination among the paper's many news and feature departments that three different reporters from three different sections sometimes showed up to cover the same event. Coffey tightened editorial controls and got personally involved in directing local and national coverage. To provide incentives for better performance, he started a program of monetary rewards for innovative work.

Detractors complain that the thick Calendar section, which chronicles L.A.'s giant entertainment industry, too often contains adoring, uncritical reporting of Tinseltown's stars and moguls. Some staffers charge that Coffey, who is friendly with Hollywood heavies like Disney's Michael Eisner, holds or softens stories that might damage his connections. A story about film executive Jerry Weintraub's financial troubles and alleged drug use, for instance, languished in the Times's computer and ran only after the Wall Street Journal published its own version.

Coffey denies that his relationships color how Calendar is edited; instead, he points to the hard-nosed pieces he has published detailing the behind-the- scenes negotiations that went into the Matsushita buyout of MCA and Sony's * purchase of Columbia Pictures. Coffey boosters contend that Calendar's emphasis on profiles and reviews simply makes the section more competitive with the highbrow arts and culture section of the New York Times, which began circulating its national edition in Los Angeles in 1988.

The paper's fevered push for national and international recognition has inevitably made local reporting something of a stepchild. Events far from home are sometimes covered with more energy and objectivity than those in the Times's own backyard. Last year, for instance, the Times made headlines nationwide when its premier profile writer, Bella Stumbo, quoted Washington Mayor Marion Barry making disparaging remarks about Jesse Jackson and threatening to cut off his political enemies "at the kneecaps." Yet a year earlier the paper was slow to run stories on Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's questionable financial dealings.

The paper's editorial page has taken the same measured approach to the recent scandal surrounding a videotaped police beating. In the month since the incident, the paper has run as many as six stories a day, from long "Column One" pieces on group violence to two Times Mirror polls showing deteriorating support for police chief Daryl Gates. It was not until Coffey and other editors interviewed Gates and published what he said, however, that the editorial board ran a cautious editorial calling on the chief to resign.

The death in 1989 of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the Times's major competitor, has helped boost the paper's daily circulation to a record high. But like every newspaper in these recessionary times, the Times sees clouds forming on its economic horizon. For more than two decades, it has waged a costly battle for suburban and San Diego readers, wooing them with regional editions of the Times, each tailored to local audiences by an on-site staff. While publisher Laventhol says he has no intention of ceding these outposts to entrenched regional and local newspapers, the Times has shelved ambitious plans to extend its reach into Northern California, the Northwest and, eventually, the Pacific Rim.

The belt tightening also includes a tough new travel and hiring policy and the cancellation last February of the afternoon edition of the Times. But compared with those of many papers, the financial constraints are modest. In the past year the Times has opened new bureaus in Berlin, Brussels and Budapest, and has somehow found enough cash to lure talent from national magazines and newspapers.

What will the aggressive, energetic upstart from the West Coast do next? Coffey will not say, but it is clear that the paper's plans are boundless. "I don't think there will come a day when a voice like rolling thunder comes out of the sky and says, 'This is the best newspaper,' " he says. "Because the day that happens is the day somebody starts gaining on you." One thing is certain: the Los Angeles Times will not relax into its old complacency -- at least not while Laventhol and Coffey are at the helm.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Steve Hart

CAPTION: Los Angeles Times

With reporting by Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles and Leslie Whitaker/New York