Pretty interesting how NYT changed from print form to digital to empower their engineers. They created their own CMS called scoop. The story outlines how they did it. Some of the things they did

1. Hack days - 80% word days and 20% hacking
2. Times open - like edlab seminars
3. Developer NYT - developerNYTimes.com - they have opened their apis for mixing and matching their apis
4. Open sourcing some of their codebase - code.nytimes.com :dependent on wordpress
5. Open source science fair
6. Beta620

They built their own commenting, recommendation, and cms.