Emily Gordon transcribes:

From season three, “Legacy,” which aired Oct. 31, 1989:

Lucy, Synergy magazine editor, to Hope, writer: It’s times like this that make me glad I’m in media. This is a remarkable piece, Hope.
Kit, another editor: Lucy and I were talking about it all morning.
Hope: I’m glad you liked the article.
Lucy: With a little work, we think it’ll make a powerful article.
Hope: Uh—it already is an article.
Kit: We mean an article for us, an article for the NEW Synergy.
Lucy: You see, one of the things we’re very anxious to do is to address the problem of—digestibility.
Kit: For a consumer magazine to succeed in reaching out to the public, it must be scannable. It has to present itself in a quick, visual, high-impact way that’s readily absorbable and instantly usable.
Hope: Are we talking about an article or an antiperspirant?

Later: Here’s a complementary passage from that excellent 2008 Atlantic essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains.” Nicholas Carr writes:

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to
article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

By the way, so that I could reread Carr’s relatively longish piece, I found myself doing the following to keep my brain on track: 1) magnifying the text to a gigantic size so that the ads and sidebars in the margins were forced off the screen; 2) hiding my OS X dock so I wasn’t distracted by the idea of all the other applications I could be jumping to, and 3) turning off NPR. I read in focused peace until…I reached the paragraph I quoted above to switch Safari tabs and amend this post. Curses!