CAP'N CRUNCH AT THE HELM

By CATHY BOOTH/LOS ANGELES

As a cost-cutting executive at general Mills, Mark Willes helped put the maker of Wheaties, Trix and Lucky Charms on a strict diet and fatten the company's bottom line. These days, as chief of the Times Mirror Co., Willes is crunching more than Cheerios--he has set out to prove that newspapers can be packaged and marketed as effectively as snack food. And he has chosen the goliath Los Angeles Times, the chain's flagship, as his latest demonstration project. In the process, the former champion of breakfasts is demolishing the old order at America's fourth largest paper. Last month he swept out publisher Richard Schlosberg III and named himself the successor. Last week he accepted the resignation of a weary Shelby Coffey III, editor since 1989.

Alarmists in the newsroom feared that Willes, an economist by training, might appoint himself editor. Instead he anointed the respected (and reassuringly rumpled) Michael Parks, the paper's 53-year-old managing editor (and a Pulitzer-prizewinning foreign correspondent). Coffey tried to put on a good face, saying he needed "a breather" after an eight-year run that included the O.J. Simpson trial, fires, floods, racial tensions inside and outside the newsroom--and four Pulitzers. But his goodbye statement spoke volumes: "There's a season for everything," he said, "and mine here has ended--happily, proudly, in midstride."

Since he signed on with the Times Mirror empire in 1995, Willes has moved with a ruthlessness that earned him the nicknames "Cap'n Crunch" and "the Cereal Killer." He whacked 2,000 jobs by killing the New York City edition of Newsday and slicing staff at papers like the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant. During the same period, the company's stock price has nearly tripled, from $22 a share to $57.

For all his slashing and burning, Willes pays homage to the lofty ideals of journalism in a sprawling megalopolis. "This is a very splintered place to live, a remarkably diverse place with nothing in common. We'd like to be that thing in common, building bridges of understanding," he says. "It sounds fluffy and goofy, but we take it seriously." Aware that Wall Street is asking if he can build as well as cut, he's equally intent on raising circulation 50%, to 1.5 million, an unheard-of target in an industry struggling just to retain readers.

What spooks Times reporters about the 56-year-old Willes is his determination to have editors work more closely with the advertising side to goose circulation and revenues. That blurs the age-old separation between reporters with tough stories to tell and admen selling space to companies the paper covers. Last week three senior business executives took on new editorial responsibilities, to the dismay of traditionalists in the newsroom.

There's no doubt that Wall Street is ratcheting pressure on editors. Maxwell E.P. King, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, also stepped down last week after his own bruising battles with bottom-liners at the Knight-Ridder chain. In Los Angeles, editor Parks says he's not worried. "Look, the walls are not going to come tumbling down," he says. "This is not Jericho. I am absolutely confident of our ability to work out this new partnership with the business side--and not only our ability, but of our need to do it." The crunch, after all, is on.

--By Cathy Booth/Los Angeles