Steve Brant, in All The News That’s FIT To Print, mentions that the New York Times applied some of Deming’s ideas in the past. He also links to several articles that mention those attempts.
One article is from the The New Yorker by Ken Auletta, 1993: Opening Up The Times:
Sulzberger [the Times’ publisher] has prescribed the management theories of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a professor emeritus at New York University and a business philosopher whose theories helped revitalize Japanese industry after the Second World War. Sulzberger and a team of Times managers studied Deming’s theories during four days of seminars in Washington in 1990.
