The BBC newspaper
The BBC's latest mobile innovation is to launch the iPlayer on iPod Touch and iPhone. I'm just curious but...could the BBC get any closer to operating a newspaper without actually buying a printing press? There's a newsroom; there's a trusted news brand; it's mobile; it's up to date; it's about current affairs. Unless you're defining a newspaper as a bunch of ink on a dead tree (and we're really not doing that any more are we?) the BBC is running a newspaper. Or technically lots of newspapers.
Update: from Martin Belam in comments "I was at a meeting two or three years back when Mark Thompson actually stated that the BBC had become a newspaper publisher". So I guess that's official then.
Is that a bad thing or a good thing?
Posted by: andy | March 10, 2008 at 02:54 PM
For whom? I would be pressed to make the case that there's a gap in the market for a public service newspaper currently unfilled by the commercial sector.
Posted by: Seamus McCauley | March 10, 2008 at 03:00 PM
I was at a meeting two or three years back when Mark Thompson actually stated that the BBC had become a newspaper publisher. I guess the main thing of course is that, from a regulatory point of view, they never *asked* anyone if it was OK to do it. Mind you, you could argue that The Telegraph and The Guardian never asked Ofcom whether it was OK for them to launch a TV channel or a radio station respectively either, but they are both sort of doing that on the web with telegraph.tv and the Guardian's podcasts.
Posted by: Martin Belam | March 10, 2008 at 03:43 PM
Ah that brings it back...Emily Bell (Guardian) used to make this point frequently in her columns. "The BBC has created the world's largest online newspaper without any such consultation..." (2005)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/oct/03/broadcasting.mondaymediasection
Incidentally we started "writing down the news" over a decade ago now...
Posted by: Jem Stone (BBC) | March 10, 2008 at 06:26 PM
Jem - indeed she did. I seem to have comprehensively forfeited any claim to originality on this one! Still...I don't think my point is entirely repetition since as the BBC takes its news offering ever more mobile, the competition with newspapers becomes increasingly direct.
Posted by: Seamus McCauley | March 10, 2008 at 09:31 PM