Keller and Color   

New York Times Foreign Editor, Bill Keller will replace Gene Roberts as Times' managing editor.

Bill Keller might still need a map to get around the streets of Manhattan when he becomes managing editor of the New York Times in September.

``I'm a bit of a mystery," admits Keller, who has spent 13 years with the paper but only the last two in the Big Apple as foreign editor. The veteran foreign correspondent will succeed Gene Roberts, 65, who is completing a three-year tour as managing editor and returning to teaching duties at the University of Maryland College of Journalism.

``I've got a lot of work to do to get people to feel comfortable with me,'' says Keller, 48. That includes encouraging members of the paper's news staff to send him e-mails and unsigned letters with their suggestions and/or concerns.

He expects to spend the next few months ``poking my nose into everything at the paper.'' But he won't have to spend too much time studying the Times' foreign operation. Before becoming foreign editor, Keller reported from Moscow for six years, winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process, and served as bureau chief in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Keller, who also has worked for the Dallas Times Herald, Portland's Oregonian and Congressional Quarterly, assumes the number two spot at a time of transition at the Times. There will be more color, more sections, an ad blitz to build circulation locally and nationally--and there's even talk of a Times gossip column.

So does the Gray Lady need a new nickname? Keller jokes about possibilities ranging from chartreuse to tangerine. But, he adds, if gray suggests ``sobriety and a sense of importance in what we do, a reluctance to be frivolous or too quick,'' then a little gray will do quite nicely.