Los Angeles Times to cut 100 from staff, trim frequency and size of zoned editions.

Buffeted by declining classified and local advertising, The Los Angeles Times is continuing to downsize both its staff and content. The newspaper is reducing staff by at least 100 to save $5 million annually and is making significant changes in its zoned non-daily editions.

Since late 1990, the Times' full-time staff has been whittled by 23 percent through voluntary separation programs. The cuts have saved the Times $105 million annually, according to Publisher and Chief Executive David Laventhol, who maintains that journalistically the newspaper is "better than ever."

To reduce staff the Times has been offering generous buyouts and thus far has avoided layoffs of full-time staffers. To sweeten the buyout packages, the company has added $3,000 worth of vocational retraining programs.

The latest round of planned reductions were announced Oct. 18 and buyout packages are being offered to 900 employees spread among different departments, including 30 editorial staffers who work on zoned editions covering the San Gabriel Valley, the South Bay, the Westside and Long Beach.

The South Bay section runs four times a week while all the others run twice a week. By mid-January these sections, with the exception of Westside, will be reduced to once a week and converted to tabloid size from the Times' standard broadsheet with a colorized magazine format. Westside will remain twice a week, but will be in the new tabloid format.

A Times spokeswoman, Laura Morgan, said the newspaper has been successful with its City Times and Valley Life tabloids and the moves are being made to improve the editorial package and are not strictly cost cutting. Scrapping the zoned editions entirely is not a consideration, she said.

Competitors see the move as part of the Times' continuing retrenchment to its core markets. Last year the newspaper pulled the plug on its San Diego edition.

"The L.A. Times strategy is to concentrate on Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, and it makes sense to cut people who they are paying well to write for a section that comes out only twice a week," said Scott Schmidt, group publisher of Thomson Newspapers Ltd., owner of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. "The quality of their suburban coverage has suffered and this is caused by a tough advertising climate.

"I'm sure they are looking down the road and saying we can't be all things to all people," Schmidt said. "Realistically, people don't buy the Times for its school board coverage but for its national, international, business and sports coverage which are still among the best in the nation."

The tough advertising climate is reflected in the Times 'most recent figures. For the four weeks ended Sept. 26, the Times' classified advertising dropped 6 percent compared to 1992 and the local category - which includes retail display ads, the lifeblood of many newspapers - was down 3.3 percent. For the year, classified is off 9.4 percent and local is down 6.3 percent.

Total ad lineage for the year is up 2.1 percent compared to a year earlier, but the figure is somewhat misleading because the Times has had to cut advertising rates to get the gain, competitors and analysts say.

Advertising rate cuts have come most aggressively in the automotive and real estate classified advertising, competitors say. Schmidt said the Times was undercutting his already low classified rates in auto dealer classifieds, so he adjusted down to maintain market share. Schmidt said his advertising revenues were up 4 percent on a dollar basis in September.

David Auger, publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News, the Times' biggest competitor in the county, said his October advertising lineage has increased almost 5 percent and "we are starting to see a turnaround." He predicts advertising will continue to increase.

The Times Mirror Newspaper Group reported a decrease of 0.7 percent in advertising revenues to $111.4 million for September.

For the year to date, ad revenues are off 2.5 percent to $1.05 billion. The group publishes daily newspapers in New York, Baltimore, Hartford, and Stamford, Conn. in addition to Los Angeles.