Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to believe that a site with that kind of traffic & resources hasn't even bothered to concatenate and minify its JS & CSS. Most of the JS files still have comments. Bizarre. They should know better.
its old school publishers who often have very little idea what they are doing and have sclerotic development processes 9 week sprints! in one case. One site I worked on did not manage to sort out a redirect of its .net version of its domain and its over 2 Years since a flagged this as a high priority problem.
See http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/ and http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/
So they have the skills, but maybe it's for other reasons they don't follow those practices.