What interactive elements? All I saw as part of the content were static images, and newspapers have had those for a long time. There were some other illustrations and animations, kind of like the way some children's books have them interspersed among the text, but none of those were interactive either.

The Times broadly refers to this kind of storytelling as 'interactive' judging by this 2014 showcase: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/29/us/year-in-int...

I guess the underlying question is how they plan to support these web technologies into the future; what's their long-term technical debt in that sense?

Given that past coders for the NYTimes have included the creator of CoffeScript/Backbone and the current maintainer of ClojureScript/Om, it seems (at least anecdotally) that whomever is in charge of staffing the dev team is doing a decent job.

Of course, some of the worst technical debt I've had to deal with came from "world-class developers", so this is no guarantee that they won't collapse under the weight of their own code at some point...but I think the odds are at least in their favor.

Another poster also referred to the animations as interactive... I guess some people think of animations as interactive.

I see animations that are driven by scrolling. Which you can control and scrub backwards and forwards again. So it's got an interactive element.

Why not? It's not like web browsers habitually break compatibility, with some notable exceptions (removal of Flash and Java)... I guess it could break as part of a CMS refresh.

The chance that this will break because of a CMS update, a new paywall, site-wide Javascript updates is far higher than because of a web browser upgrade.