I've hard this style referred to as 'Snow Fall Journalism', actually!
While the story was interesting, I was also more interested in the layout. In the past there were a lot of "over the top" Flash "experience" sites, with the decline of Flash and skyrocket of "thumb up and down" mobile sites I feel there has also been a drop in experimental layouts and visuals. A lot of that stuff was crap, but it's great to be surprised every now and then. Thumbs up bbc!
I generally like the Snowfall-style articles, but for some reason this is the first time where I felt a (very vague) sense that the style was overshadowing the content a little. That said, I prefer a little more experimentation in this area over staying safe...
I felt the exact opposite, that this was the first time the content overshadowed the flashiness. I read it on a relatively low-end machine, so it's possible the flashy stuff was just disabled, which in itself would be great.
Strangely I came to comment because I had the opposite reaction. I couldn't read the article because I find the presentation way too noisy (and in general can't stand vertical scrolling much.)