I was one of Scott's early hires and he knows what he's talking about. ProPublica was conceived [1] as a place to do the old-school, indepth investigative journalism that newspapers did before newspaper revenue started tanking. I was hired as a web producer and ProPublica's work would still be going on today with a traditional web presence. But news application development was not necessarily baked into that mission. Now the developers work as journalistic peers with the investigative reporters, as well as developing tech, designing and deploying applications. That wouldn't be the case if Scott hadn't continued to emphasize that there's more to his group than just maintaining the website...such advocacy is needed even in a small, flat-hierarchy, forward-thinking organization.
Tech innovation isn't completely a rarity in the news biz. For example, Django, a python web framework, was created by devs at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper. While I don't know for sure, I'd be very surprised to learn that someone up the chain was advocating there efforts at some point in its dev/adoption at the paper.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/about/press-release1