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United Kingdom newspapers upset over BBC’s iPhone apps
February 19, 2010 | 9:30 am
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By Chris Meadows
Rupert Murdoch’s and other newspaper magnates’ antipathy for news-aggregation websites such as Google News is well-known in America. But interestingly enough, there is a similar controversy going on in the United Kingdom.
Recently, the BBC announced plans to create iPhone apps that would act as portals to put news, sports, and other entertainment on the devices. Twenty-four hours later, the Newspaper Publishers Association—a trade group made up of many major UK newspaper publishers—issued a statement condemning the BBC’s plans as potentially undermining its members own efforts in that field.
mocoNews.net notes:
Many of these groups already regard the BBC News website’s popularity as a barrier to them making substantial advertising or paid content income from their own sites. But if they let that genie out of the bottle, when the site launched in 1997, they’re not about to do so with other new initiatives…
I guess this must be an example of the way the United Kingdom is different from the United States, because it seems to me that would be like the New York Times getting mad at CNN for creating a news website and apps.
Isn’t there room for more than one news provider even in a country as small as the UK?
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Comments:
You’re right that it’s an example of how the civilized world and the US differ, but off in your analogy. The key is that the Beeb is publicly-funded, unlike the NYT or CNN, so the newspapers are facing a competitor that not only makes an arguably superior product available for “free”, it doesn’t have any need to turn a profit.
The analogy doesn’t work because the BBC is publicly funded by the British taxpayer and CNN is a commercial enterprise.
In the US we don’t have a single government controlled media source that commercial media has to compete with.
The BBC is ‘taxpayer funded’ not ‘government controlled’. This is an important distinction. It is independent, with an independent governing body, and frequently at odds with both the British Government and opposition parties (whicheve stripe is in power).
It is also the only news organization I have ever seen in any country anywhere that reports critically on itself.
Madly, Britishly unique.
Martin
If I could have the BBC world news iPhone App it would be all over for CNN and NPR and all the other American “news” infotainment organizations.
As small as the UK? 61m people?
Apparently this has been a Murdoch family obsession since radio news broadcasting started in Australia.
This is not the first run-in the BBC has had with commercial information providers. A few years ago it developed an education offering called BBC Jam, spent millions building it, and was then forced to shutter it soon after launch because of complaints from commercial educational publishers, which the UK Government upheld.