From a Washington Post story by media critic Erik Wemple headlined “Why the New York Times is looking to shorten stories”:

Not long into his tenure as executive editor of the New York Times, Max Frankel took note of how much reading the paper was assigning its subscribers. “Yes, we need and want enterprise stories,” wrote Frankel in a two-page internal memo in July 1987. “But egads, we are drowning the reader in ink.”