A few additional details on the system in question in this 2017 Financial Times piece (archive.is copy): http://archive.is/8RzKm

The system was "Horizon".

The vendor, Fujitsu.

Horizon warrants its own Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_(IT_system)

Fujitsu have their own set of propaganda^Wwhite papers on the system:

https://www.fujitsu.com/uk/Images/postoffice-customer-experi...

https://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/WWW2/UKpostoffice2.pdf

https://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/WWW2/UKPostOffice.pdf

An excellent and detailed bit of coverage in this blog (see meta/soapbox below):

https://becarefulwhatyouwishfornickwallis.blogspot.com/2013/...

Nick Wallis (himself a BBC presenter and journalist) spins out the Post Office / Horizon story into its own site: https://www.postofficetrial.com
There are several posts on the settlement, one of which looks at just what the claimants are receiving for decades of injustice -- it works out to an average of £47,101 each.

https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/12/further-questions.ht...

Details on the trial:

https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/horizon-trial-day-8-...

The Register, biting the hand...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/10/subpostmasters_prep...

The Horizon system was audited in 2013, by Second Sight, though the UKPO denied the report's findings:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/20/post_office_deny_pr...

Note that the BBC itself covered the interim Second Sight report, a fact it entirely neglected to mention in TFA for this post. See:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23233573

Computer Weekly, from 2013:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240175402/Post-Office-a...

(Also a timeline of reporting dating to 2009: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252475310/Post-Office-se... ... more below.)

The Horizon system may be replaced, possibly by an IBM project:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500249009/Post-Office-l...

________________________________

Meta:

There are several schools of thought regarding reportage and how to report a story. The BBC's piece here is heavy on the human impact / human interest elements of the story, which are a relevant element. However it covers this aspect virtually exclusively, neglecting to identify the timeframe or previous history of the case, including its own reporting, but also of the relevant system and company names involved. This strikes me as shoddy practice.

Listening to a recent podcast (which doesn't much matter), a guest quipped regarding the decline of newspapers that they would often hear from people who would complain about the poor quality of newspaper coverage, but who didn't subscribe to their own paper. This strikes me as an extraordinarily shallow dismissal.

If you go through historical newspaper coverage, at least some of it (usually national coverage, though also many major city papers) was, at least at times, exceedingly good. I do a significant amount of historical research and can attest to this. I also live in a household which, not on the basis of my own support, does subscribe to a major city daily paper. Whose quality is absolutely abysmal. (The publishers themselves are something of an international joke.)

It's almost certainly a self-reinforcing situation, but when front-page coverage is a mix of human-interest and international newswire coverage, when what little actual news that does exist is also largely hidden on inside pages and also almost exclusively news wires, when entire sections consist of graphic-illustration front pages and syndicated-content filler (Business, Homes, Living, Arts & Entertainment, Autos, etc., with Sport being a possible exception), the value proposition becomes exceedingly questionable. The exclusive realm of semi-original coverage is opinion and column pieces, though those too are lagely void of any material significance.

And when the writing style itself becomes so larded with stylebook syntactic candy that the reader must wade through hip-deep lakes of the stuff to find a single salient factual or contextual element ... what's the use? That's above and beyond the near-total human-interest (or in politics, horse-race) elements of the reporting, rather than providing any level of background or context, let alone focusing on it.

All of which is well-illustrated in this BBC piece, nominally among the better journalistic sources remaining.

It's sources available online -- blogs, interest sites, occasionally relic holdouts of higher-quality journalism (FT is ... pretty good, though even it was light on details in the item cited here), or often-mocked (with some justification) sites such as The Register, which actually deliver meat. As well as the odd industry-specific outlet as with Computer Weekly.

One of the simplest, easiest, and most effective practices is simply to list previous coverage on a topic. This is something some news sites do, but many do not. The BBC should absolutely adopt this practice.

Computer Weekly does, as noted in another comment on this thread. See:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252475310/Post-Office-se...

(I'll note that HN's own moderators often step in to add not only previous coverage of perennial topics and posts, but previous mentions of larger / developing stories, something I appreciate about the site.)

That rot in jouralism and the news sector is to a huge extent self-inflicted injury. And could be addressed, if there was awareness and will.

</soapbox>