In my recollection, NYT started/popularized the whole "reportage as a interactive story with stuff moving as you scroll" on the web, but I think it was web developers wanting to emulate the Macbook/iPhone inertia scroll that started the whole "lets override scroll behaviour" trend.
The first I ever saw of it was the NYT story about the deadly avalanche at Stevens Pass in WA state. I liked it for that story but not so much for this product site.
If I wanted to wait 1/2 second for each part of the page to load I’d have stayed on dialup.