The New York Times said it expected the changes to result in savings of $42 million.

The narrower format, offset by some additional pages, will reduce the space the paper has for news by 5 percent, Executive Editor Bill Keller said in the article.

The Times will join a list of several other papers from The Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times that have reduced their size as they cut newsprint and other production costs and try to stem a loss of readers and advertising to the Internet and other media.

Separately, Chief Financial Officer Leonard Forman will retire in 2007 after the company names a successor, another article posted on the Times Web site said.

Forman was president of The New York Times Co. Magazine Group from 1998 until it was sold in 2001, the biography on the company's Web site says. He was senior vice president for corporate development, new ventures and electronic businesses from 1996 to 1998.

He also worked for the Times Co. as director of corporate planning and chief economist from 1974 to 1986.

Pearlstine became a senior adviser to Time Warner in January after 11 years in the firm's top editorial job.

Often when a buyout firm brings aboard new talent, it is with an acquisition target already in mind.

A Carlyle spokesman insisted Pearlstine's hiring "does not presage an existing deal. It's just an effort to bolster our media expertise."

Time Inc. remains the world's biggest magazine publisher - thanks in part to its $1.6 billion purchase of British publisher IPC, but it is a slow-growth unit of the parent company and has been mentioned from time to time as a potential spin-off possibility.

Corporate raider Carl Icahn, who actively pursued the idea of a corporate bust-up, was thwarted earlier this year when he could not muster enough support among institutional investors.

Pearlstine said, "Everything I've heard at Time Warner is zero interest in selling anything, and certainly not Time Inc. I've certainly not been hired to run anything."

"I imagine I'll be doing a lot of listening and learning over the next few months," said Pearlstine.

He was the executive editor at The Wall Street Journal and a short-lived head of acquisition firm Friday Holdings in the mid-1990s before joining Time Inc. as editor-in-chief.