Like any other company's engineering blog, a post like this can help with recruiting and it's also a nice way for the team to summarize and share what they built.

It's also relevant to the NYT's goal of surviving the digital shift. Giving the world a peek under the hood isn't just an interesting story, it's brand-building for a publication that wants to be seen as modern.

Open sourcing it is a good suggestion and one that some have made previously. Open sourcing it requires a fair amount of work to remove company-specific, internal stuff and making it easy for others to install, upgrade and maintain it on their own. That fair amount of work hasn't yet made it high on a priority list, but let us hope it will :-)