Welcome to the lack lust journalism of the BBC. I would call them mediocre, but that's not the correct way to explain "the worst possible journalistic quality."
The BBC has really gone downhill recently, especially the "magazine" style articles.
A lot of their business and future articles are done by freelancers, and many of them are literally ripper from Quora (albeit with attribution).
Their news coverage is still good though, Lyse Doucet is a great journalist who did some fantastic coverage of the Arab Spring. They also manage to avoid shitting the bed whenever breaking news happens, as CNN in particular tends to do.
About the only thing I'd moan to the BBC about is that they still use flash for the videos on their website.
The rest of the BBC website, Radios 1 - 6 + Asian, TV stations (perhaps some of BBC 3/4 is bottom feeding), weather forecasts, world news, is awesome. That's just all I can think of off the top of my head.
Their articles are still decent enough that they'll make it to the front page of HN.
In specific areas they can be bettered, e.g. I prefer some specific football (soccer) websites, but this isn't a moan just a fact that they have to cover everything. As a general resource certainly for world news I think they're the standard to match.
They only use flash on the desktop site. If you spoof your user agent to that of a mobile device, you get exactly the same site, except with html5 video.
I don't fully understand the reason for not using html5 video when on desktop, it functions perfectly.
I think their problem is that they've become a bit of a content factory, which links back to the whole freelancers thing. They churn out a lot of articles, and some are much better than others. It's the shotgun approach to getting views.
Compared to most US news, the BBC is a shining star. You should watch some 24 hour US news sometime. Fox News, CNN or MSNBC are designed for the lowest common denominator.
