Hello, Sweetheart! Get Me Remake!

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."