Lack of Trust

The BBC Trust and the BBC Executive clearly look at market impact differently. BBC News have been developing an iPhone app frantically for months, confident in the belief that it was only a better way of delivering the same content to licence-fee payers. Their logic - you can browse the web with a smartphone, and see the same stuff; why not use the existing functionality of the phone and do it much more neatly ? And there were hopes the BBC News app could launch in April.

The Trust (and I don't know whether they've seen a demo of any such app) have clearly taken the view that it could have a market impact, when newspapers might make money selling an app that competes in news. So, in their deep love of process, The Trust are now going to conduct an "assessment", possibly followed by a "public value test". They have been propelled into this by the Newspaper Publishers' Association.

There's no clear pattern here - Sky News and The Telegraph are offering news apps for free; The Guardian's app for iPhones costs a one-off £2.39. The Trust look twitchy and weak on this one. If the management's assertion is that there's no "new" or "specially tailored" content going to the app, then logic is with the Executive. But The Trust clearly don't trust them.