Michael Johnston, president of the Scottish Newspapers Society, has reacted angrily to the announcement by the BBC that it will develop smart phone applications to deliver its online news content and called into question much of the news reporting of BBC Scotland.

Johnston described the BBC announcement as “a very disappointing decision” which he said “did not reflect what was actually happening” in the real world.

“The purpose of a state-funded BBC is to provide unique services which cannot be provided elsewhere,” commented Johnston.

He continued to say that when the SNS held meetings with BBC executives in Scotland as part of the lobbying against the apps, “it was quite clear” that they were “not prepared to listen” and that they were “very keen to pursue the apps come what may.”

Johnston added “this decision will stifle the new services being provided by the commercial world, it’s a clear distortion of the marketplace because what will happen is that tax payers’ money will be moved into apps which would otherwise have been developed at cost to the public and the commercial sector…the BBC wants to get ever bigger at the tax payers expense. They get £3.2bln pounds a year and they would argue that there is a demand for their services to be provided as well but that is not the purpose of the BBC. The BBC is supposed to provide services that the commercial sector cannot, and the commercial sector is providing them because these services are already there.”

Johnston added that the SNS was not surprised by the decision despite the lobbying done by the Newspaper Society to the BBC Trust, saying that the BBC clearly wanted to be in the app space no matter what despite the services already being provided by commercial companies.