A Times news article reports on the City of New York moving homeless people, some of them mentally ill, substance-abusing, or sex offenders, at government expense into hotels on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It includes this sentence: "The owner of a well-known French bistro, Nice Matin, which adjoins the Lucerne, said he believed the harsh rhetoric among some in the neighborhood had hurt business."
If the bistro is indeed "well-known," it's unnecessary to inform Times readers of that—they already know, so it is redundant. "Well-known" is like the word "famous"—in cases where it's accurate, it's almost always unnecessary.
The same redundancy objection applies, by the way, to the term "French bistro." Are there non-French bistros? It is late August so maybe all the editors who would ordinarily catch this sort of thing are on vacation, but maybe even at peak levels this is just about what you can expect of Times editing care these days. Would this sort of thing ever have gotten through back in the days when Allan M. Siegal was running the copy desk?
It may be that the Internet has made things worse, because unnecessary words used to carry a cost to the publisher of unnecessary paper and ink and space in delivery trucks, in addition to the cost to reader in time.