COLUMN ONE : News Giant Makes Big Changes : In substance and style, the New York Times is undergoing a metamorphosis. The newspaper’s leadership is hoping to win back hometown circulation and attract younger readers.

Some mornings lately, the newspaper that is historically the most influential in America is inspiring a little eye-rubbing, even some expressions of astonishment. Is this the same paper that for so long has set standards in American journalism?

One headline, under a picture of a prominent basketball coach with his arms stretched upright, tries to be funny by echoing a deodorant commercial: “Raise your hands if you’re sure.”

A Sunday page-one feature spread trumpets the arrival at McDonald’s of a hamburger with less fat--in a tone advertising people might call lite. “McLean Left! McLean Left! Make way for the Brave New Burger!” it begins.

Something is happening to the New York Times, one of the most powerful and serious-minded media institutions in America.

Subtly, uneasily, the nation’s newspaper of record is trying to reinvent itself--to change its personality and broaden its appeal. And the changes are caused by deep-seated problems and an important shift in strategic focus.

Without saying much about it publicly, executives have privately acknowledged that the Times is shifting away from its long-term plan to grow mainly by expanding nationwide rather than in New York. The 11-year-old national edition has gained readers, but it has not attracted as much advertising as hoped.

At the same time, competition from other New York area papers has intensified and is threatening to chip away at the Times’ advertising base.

So, after years of being criticized for marginally covering its own city or suburbs, the New York Times has found that to prosper it now must win back more of the old neighborhood--a neighborhood that in some ways it thought it had outgrown.

In addition, the Times must try to attract the next generation of readers. Traditionally dry, sober and sometimes daunting in its style, the Times has an older readership than its competitors and reaches proportionately fewer homes with children.

The changes amount to one of the most important transitions in the paper’s 139-year history and are an indicator of problems that newspapers in general now face.

“We are looking for a new New York Times--in look, in feel and content--for the next 20 years,” said Lance R. Primis, the Times’ president and general manager.

Others put it differently. In the word of one veteran staff member who is supportive, but wary, of the changes, “We are motivated by fear.”

Later this year, the Times will begin publishing in color on Sunday in its feature sections, and eventually it will use color every day. “I think younger readers demand it,” Primis said.

There will be an expanded local news section. The paper also has expanded its sports section and given it “a grittier tone,” as Primis put it. A new generation of editors is being put in place. And much emphasis and thought is now given to graphics, to bigger headlines, to making the paper, in Executive Editor Max Frankel’s words, “user-friendly.”

Yet such change does not come easily to a paper so gravely serious, in whose pages people are still addressed as Mr. and Mrs. and whose very motto--”All the News That’s Fit to Print”--manifests a sense that its reporters and editors help define what is important.

Stories Criticized

Already the Times has come under a storm of criticism--mostly for two stories. One was an uncritical page-one piece publicizing Kitty Kelley’s thinly documented Nancy Reagan biography. The other was a unflattering profile of the alleged victim in the Palm Beach, Fla., rape case that involves William Kennedy Smith, which broke with conventional journalistic practice and identified her.

More than 100 Times reporters and editors condemned the rape story in a petition and at an angry staff meeting, and the editors eventually published a note expressing some regrets.

A columnist for the racy New York Post gloated that “like everyone else in this town, I now pick up the New York Times only for the gossip and sports pages.”

Annoyed, defensive, Frankel found himself having to explain that the New York Times still meant to be a “serious” newspaper.

In general, Times executives are reticent about their intentions. “What is the point of telling everyone what our plan is?” asked Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., deputy publisher and heir apparent. “Let them see it after we have done it,” he said, declining to be interviewed.

But much of the strategy can be deduced.

It is important in doing so to know how the Times has defined itself for the last two decades and how other newspapers followed its lead.

In the mid-1970s, New York was changing, becoming increasingly Latino, black and Asian. In the suburbs, the Times was ringed by some of the strongest suburban daily papers in the country.

The paper’s management decided its growth lay largely outside the New York area--where it could concentrate on high-income readers. For a time, it closed its bureaus in the boroughs outside Manhattan. And its coverage of the city, many on the staff complained, emphasized the positives.

On one occasion, recalls one Times veteran, former Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal stood on his balcony overlooking Central Park, extolling the glories of New York. Mayor Abe Beame, his guest for the evening, objected. “You ought to come down in the streets with the rest of us,” he said.

National Strategy

In 1980, the Times launched its national edition, making home delivery available across America, mainly in neighborhoods with household incomes over $100,000.

Circulation outside the Boston-to-Washington corridor swelled, from about 40,000 in 1980 to 248,000 last March, helping boost overall circulation to 1.2 million today.

Meanwhile, readership in New York has remained nearly unchanged, leaving Times readers evenly divided into thirds--the New York area, the Eastern Seaboard and the national edition.

As Frankel put it, “Our identity has not been primarily geographic. It has been demographic.”

In truth, the Times’ strategy was only a more extreme version of the sort many big-city papers adopted. By the 1970s, with fewer people reading and advertisers pushing for ways to target the affluent, many newspapers began positioning themselves as a medium for middle- and upper-income readers.

Now, in and around Boston, only 23% of the households buy the Boston Globe. In the Dallas area, 33% buy the Morning News. In metropolitan Los Angeles, only 24% buy the Los Angeles Times. Around Chicago, 25% buy the Tribune.

And in New York, only 10% buy the Times.

Within the last two years, however, it became increasingly clear that something was wrong with the Times’ national strategy.

At a brown-bag lunch with the staff of the Times’ Washington bureau this winter, Deputy Publisher Sulzberger “made it plain,” one staff member said, “that the national edition was not the engine of growth that people had thought it was going to be. It attracted readers, but it wasn’t happening as an ad vehicle.”

“I think it is safe to say that advertisers are not looking nationally. They are looking regionally,” Times General Manager Primis said in an interview. “And they are going to buy the New York Times because of what we are in New York and the Eastern corridor.”

The nature of newspaper advertising was changing too. National advertising was diminishing while local advertising was becoming a bigger share of newspaper revenue. And structural changes in retailing began to pare advertising dollars so that newspapers needed bigger local audiences to compete.

Recession accelerated the problems. It slashed profits of the New York Times--which had boomed since the 1970s--by half in just three years.

As a result, the paper had to shift strategy. It is not abandoning its national edition. But “aggressive growth in our hometown circulation is our No. 1 circulation priority,” Senior Vice President for Circulation William Pollack told Wall Street analysts recently.

The Times will not be going head-to-head with New York’s fabled, often shrill, tabloids. Nor will the paper that has won an unparallelled 63 Pulitzer Prizes, Frankel says, “stop covering South Africa, or Pakistan or Washington or all the other things we are devoted to.”

But somehow the Times must start to appeal to more of those upper-middle-class hometown readers who, finding the Times too elitist and forbidding, have preferred either television or some other paper.

In a sense, it is the same problem the rest of the newspaper industry is facing. But solving these problems has enormous implications for the Times. The paper that historically has been the most important in America is trying to forge a new personality while somehow not losing its old one.

In many ways, the change is much like the transformation of the Times two decades ago. With its very survival in doubt, the paper revived itself under Rosenthal’s guidance in the mid-1970s by developing a series of often-soft feature sections--such as Living and Home--that initially angered traditionalists but appealed to advertisers. The changes accelerated similar coverage of lifestyle, science and business at other papers and helped innovate newspaper design.

Already there may be signs that the newest revolution at the Times could be having some impact. After a decade of being almost flat, the Times’ weekday circulation in the greater New York City area, grew by 27,000 over the last year, an increase Times executives say was influenced only slightly by a strike at the New York Daily News.

But changing a newspaper’s personality is not easy. The most visible and controversial element so far has been the attempt to change what the newspaper of record defines as news on its front page.

New Personality

Now, mixed in with its famed foreign and national news reports, are more stories about social trends, such as changing demographics or health care or affirmative action--often leading the paper rather than merely appearing inside or on the bottom of page one.

And some of the trends are not so serious.

In the years since Frankel became executive editor in late 1986, the Times’ front page has emphasized such stories as rising hemlines, the recall of Perrier water or the difficulty of giving dinner parties when everybody is health-conscious.

Some staff members now refer to “the Oprah Winfrey” corner of page one.

To explain the changes, Frankel says that in the era of information overload, computers, cable and instant global television, newspapers must rethink what they consider “hard” news versus “soft” features.

“Why is an airplane crash in which five people were killed harder news than the discovery that 50,000 jobs have been lost in the region?” Frankel asks.

Or take one of his first attempts to make this point--by putting on page one a story about the fashion industry moving toward shorter skirts. “Why is that soft?” Frankel says. “If half the women in America suddenly find their wardrobes out of date? . . .”

Implicitly, Frankel is acknowledging that in this day of 24-hour global news, even the New York Times cannot set the news agenda unilaterally. People know the news from television and radio long before they pick up the morning paper.

What Frankel calls the “constant reinvention” of the Times also means, say insiders, that the paper wants to be hip, to be part of the buzz. “These guys think that what people are talking about ought to be in the New York Times,” said one high-ranking insider, “and I think most people think that is the right idea.”

Hence Perrier or dinner parties or Kitty Kelley’s celebrity biography are on page one.

The vision is not entirely Frankel’s. The paper’s reinvention is being heavily influenced by the family scion, 39-year-old Arthur Jr., the son and namesake of the publisher, Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger.

“It would be difficult to overestimate his influence over what is happening,” one Times official said. Unlike his father, who allowed the editor and business professionals to direct the paper, Arthur Jr. “has very definite ideas” about where he wants the Times to go and intends to implement them, one friend explained.

For one thing, Arthur Jr. is a disciple of W. Edwards Deming, a theorist in quality control who champions a cooperative, bottom-up management style and sees many American business practices as punitive rather than nurturing. The Times has sent senior management on a retreat to study Deming, and now has a series of employee committees, with names such as “Constancy of Purpose,” evaluating such routine procedures as employee performance reviews.

Arthur Jr., staffers say, also is driven by a strong sense of ethnic and cultural diversity, believing that the Times must have women and minorities in positions of power to reflect an increasingly polyglot culture.

More Than One Voice

Fans such as Times columnist Anna Quindlen speak admiringly of Arthur Jr.’s vision. When she wrote a column criticizing the paper’s profile of the alleged Palm Beach rape victim, Arthur made a display of praising her in the newsroom. Afterward, he told Quindlen he wanted to make “a very public gesture” so that people would understand “the newspaper does not speak with just one voice.”

But some at the paper worry that Arthur Jr. is brash, lacking the diplomacy of his father.

“Sometimes (the younger) Arthur gives people the impression that he doesn’t fully understand what he’s inheriting,” said one senior correspondent. “You can’t go messing with the front page. He doesn’t understand how fragile the franchise is.”

Others on the staff, many who favor the changes, say that sometimes the new stories have been simply misconceived.

“Max (Frankel) loves to see the socially significant in mundane things,” said one Times veteran. “Sometimes it can produce brilliant insights. Sometimes it is just silly, like McLean hamburgers.”

Others praise Frankel and Managing Editor Joseph Lelyveld as brilliant and serious men but say both are intellectuals for whom populism does not come naturally.

“Who said populism is our object?” Frankel responds. On the other hand, he counters, he and Lelyveld are both well-rounded. “We were both police reporters. We are both sports fans. We are both complete journalists.”

Perhaps the change that says most about the Times’ revolution was the decision earlier this year to finally address what Frankel himself says was one of the paper’s biggest weaknesses--sports.

The Times was much criticized for its dismissive approach to the subject. It was the only major paper in the country without a separate sports section, and because of printing press limitations, its scant four pages would float in different locations in the paper.

When Times management decided to expand the size of the sports section by 50% earlier this year, to anchor it in the same place each day and promote it heavily on the front of the local section, they were hoping that it would help establish the Times’ new identity in several ways.

For one, the new sports pages are unrelentingly local, to help link the paper and the city. (In part because of the limits of the Times’ presses, most of the expansion of the sports coverage does not appear in the national edition.)

The sports pages are also designed to send a signal that the Times is not the same paper--that it is no longer so high and mighty.

People would look at the Times’ sports pages, Frankel admits, and say, “Dammit, I can’t even find it half the time. It means you don’t care about sports. You think you are so elitist.”

The sports pages are supposed to look and read and be about topics that suggest a different kind of New York Times.

“Look at the headline we ran on the Yankees today,” said sports editor Neil Amdur. The headline in question read fast, like a Nike ad, in rock-video speed: “Disorder. Tumult. Yankees.”

“People who read this would probably say, ‘Gee, that is very un-Times-ish,’ ” Amdur said. “But that is the direction we want to go.”

The sports pages are key to another Times problem: the young.

All newspapers are worried because Americans under age 35 are not becoming newspaper readers the way their parents did. But many analysts think the Times may be more vulnerable than most.

It already has fewer readers age 18 to 34 than any of its competitors, be it the Daily News and Newsday in New York or the Record and Star-Ledger in New Jersey. And it has drastically fewer readers with children in their households, only 29% versus about 40% for most of its competition.

In addition to expanding sports, the Times is hoping to win younger readers by using techniques once associated mostly with papers such as USA Today--including color, packaging, graphics and bigger headlines designed for the TV generation. It has also reintroduced a program, abandoned in the 1970s, to market the Times on college campuses, and it is now producing a second main news section on Sundays aimed at college-age readers.

But perhaps the most dramatic signs of how much the Times wants to change are internal.

One is the hiring of 34-year-old Adam Moss to become a consultant with broad, undefined authority. He reports to Managing Editor Lelyveld.

Moss, whose job is to get to know the paper and come up with new ideas, was the founder of 7 Days, a hip weekly aimed at New York young professionals, which closed last year.

“Even if Adam does nothing, the message, consciously or not, has been sent: Adam is like a stick over our heads,” said a staffer. “We have to prove we are more creative. We have to be as innovative as Adam is, because that is the way to keep Adam away from our door.”

In addition to Moss, Lelyveld and Frankel are putting in place a whole new generation of editors, many of them still deputy department heads. There is a new culture editor, a new metro editor and deputy, and a new deputy magazine editor.

Another factor also is driving the changes at the Times. It is pride, or as Frankel put it, a tradition that the New York Times be the best in whatever it does.

Pride, staffers say, was a key factor in the decision earlier this year to launch the sports section. The shift back to New York was supposed to be highlighted this year by expanding the local news coverage.

But sometime after October, the decision was made to expand the sports pages first.

One reason, staff members say, was a television commercial for New York Newsday, the spinoff of the Long Island tabloid that is owned by Times Mirror, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Newsday is now challenging the Times in Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan with a New York edition.

The Newsday ad sought to lure readers by criticizing the Times’ sports section. While the song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was sung in the wrong rhythm, the lyrics ran across the bottom of the screen in the script of the Times’ nameplate.

“Is your paper a little off when it comes to sports?” the announcer asked. “Then get the only sports section rated New York’s best four years in a row . . . New York Newsday.”

“That really pissed off a lot of people around here,” one New York Times official said.

The incident points out another problem. Now that it wants to re-emphasize New York, it is facing tougher competition than a decade ago. Each of the suburban papers is stronger, from the Newark Star-Ledger to the Bergen Record in New Jersey, the Westchester papers in New York. And Long Island’s Newsday has added its New York edition.

“What we are very much committed to doing is increasing our presence in the region and the city, and that means considerably more bodies and redefining our resources and priorities,” said metropolitan editor Gerald Boyd.

Privately, others at the paper are more blunt.

“The Times years ago ceded the role of being the dominant paper in Long Island and New Jersey and the suburbs to the suburban competition,” said one staffer, familiar with Times strategy. “Now we are going to take the battle back to the suburbs. But instead of fighting Newsday in Long Island, we are going to have to fight them in the city.”

As a key part of that plan, the Times has built a new printing plant in Edison, N.J., which will allow it to start printing color in its Sunday feature sections and perhaps to start custom-tailoring its sections for advertisers around the New York area. The opening of the Edison plant and the share of the paper it will produce has been set back by recession and prolonged labor negotiations.

But the stakes are high. Newspaper analysts such as Kenneth Berents of Alex. Brown & Co. say that the Times must make sure that advertisers do not start sending some of their business to Newsday in New York or the Bergen Record in New Jersey.

For now, though, such concerns as adding color or special sections for the suburbs are not the hard part.

“The trick,” said one key editor, “is how to do (all) this and still be the New York Times.”