And there doubtless will be more squawking–what publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. calls ““a moment of breath being taken in’’–when the gray lady next week gets her biggest makeover in a generation. The Times will launch a new, six-section paper in New York, with sports and culture getting their own daily sections and Home and Living–which Sulzberger says were ““a little tired’’–morphing into House and Home, and Dining In, Dining Out.

But this isn’t necessarily the arrival of Egg McTimes. Editorial content will change only subtly, at least at first. Most deadlines will be three hours later, making for fresher news (and more West Coast box scores). The culture and sports pages will be beefed up. ““This is about re-creating the Times for a new generation of readers,’’ says Sulzberger, who adds, in reference to his role as family scion, ““Each generation gets a chance to affect the paper.’’ This is his.

The Times will now have the flexibility to go to eight sections, and a joint business/editorial committee is already considering new once-a-week sections like Circuits, about personal technology, and perhaps health and fitness, fashion, and travel.

Perhaps the biggest change is that the Times also will be able to run color photographs in its daily editions, rather than just the stagy travel and arts photos on Sunday. Color in sports and the arts will begin immediately, along with–guess what?–color advertising. But page-one news photos will be phased in slowly, partly so the paper can get the hang of using fast-breaking action photos without their bleeding messily on the newsprint. One day in October, Sulzberger suggests, an editor will decide the time is right. ““Maybe President Clinton will appear in a hot-air-balloon race,’’ he jokes hopefully.

So what, you say? Probably your local paper has been running color–and more articles on ““tabletop design,’’ one topic readers will be seeing more of, says Times president Janet Robinson–for years. Well, we’re talking about a newspaper that announced Princess Diana’s death in a smaller headline than the UPS settlement got.

So any change can be seen as part of an ongoing dumbing-down. Says one weary critic, Joseph Epstein, editor of the American Scholar: ““Bring on the funny pages!''

Maybe he should get over it, but maybe he shouldn’t. The Times is special, not so much for the paper itself as for its effect on everybody else. Pre-eminent among a tiny handful of papers including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post (NEWSWEEK’S sister publication), the Times sets the agenda for what the network-news divisions and a host of other news outlets do. Local papers, for their survival, are getting more local, with occasional forays by the bigger ones to write 12-part series to send to the Pulitzer Prize committee. They’ve cut back on international and national news, and seldom move the ball on such stories anymore. But the Times shows no signs of giving up its commitment to worldwide coverage.

Unlike some other companies, the Times hasn’t been panicking about the eventual obsolescence of truck-delivered newsprint. Sure, the Times is on the Web and owns TV stations and magazines, but the changes next week show that it is pouring the company’s resources into its core asset, the newspaper. The new printing plant in Queens alone cost $350 million to open, just a decade after another plant that cost even more. While it’s hard to believe that the Times can win many more readers in the New York area, where 65 percent of its readers already live, the new measures may help persuade more advertisers to support the paper’s slow-growing (but profitable) national edition. Although the national edition won’t have color yet, getting more advertisers to buy ““across the board’’ will help pay the freight. The paper has recently boosted home delivery around the country to 45 markets from 20, and is pushing hard for more. Indeed, the Times’s makeover is less about putting the red in Red Square than putting the national newspaper more squarely in the black.