Any Publication That Wants To Be Taken Seriously probably has a style manual that de-hey'd any and all ink on its pages.

Yet the "hey" has been a sort of gatekeeper (are you in or are you square) in video form. The afore mentioned Fonzie salutation was a 70s take/exaggeration of 50s cool.

This evolved/devloved in the 80s into the catch phrase. In the 90s, the "greeting" came back with a vengance via the instantly annoying "waaazzzzuupppp" and its mutations which eventually led to the Joey on Friends/Brooklyn wiseguy opener "How You doin'?"

The web's connectivity gives rise to micro-broadcast/mini-market/go ultra-tribal. There already are "dialects" of English on several websites -- slashdot, fark, 4chan, etc. -- that would never be up to the NY Times' "fit to print" standard.

And they like it that way.