It's interesting you say that the NYT has world-class developers, because it seemed like (from the leaked memo a few weeks back) that the digital side is kind of a mess right now - but maybe that's a direction vs. talent problem.
To name but a few: Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, Underscore, Coffeescript), Mike Bostock (D3), Amanda Cox (creator of a lot of the NYT's great data visualizations), Kevin Quealy (Amanda's partner in vis), Gregor Aisch (wrote much of DataWrapper), and until recently David Nolen (aka Swannodette of Clojure & Clojurescript fame) all work for the NYT.
I haven't done a detailed read-through of the innovation report, but Niemanlab's writeup comports with my sense of the state of digital journalism (and the Niemanlab folks are quite good): http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-i...
Key to many of the problems that orgs like the NYT have are not a lack of prestige or ability to attract top tier talent. The problem news orgs have are organizational and structural, which are partially a matter of leadership and priorities.
Anyway, irrespective of any of that, the NYT does innovative things with data and visualization before anybody else in journalism, or hell even visualization in general, does (not to say that they're the only ones pushing the state of the art).