The NYT devs consist of several dev groups and a mix of stacks...some which are business-facing/product, and others that are in editorial (i.e. interactive news graphics). On the editorial side, they are one of the few in the news business that were using Ruby/Rails (the vast majority of newsrooms use Python/Django). There's also obviously a primarily-JavaScript group.
Right...I should've clarified...by "editorial", I meant the team that focuses on the public facing news projects, such as Derek Willis's campaign finance apps and utilities (http://itemizer.herokuapp.com/)...I don't think they do a lot of monolithic-type Rails apps currently, though, at least compared to client-side-heavy projects
