Paul Brannan, then emerging platforms editor at BBC News, used a session at the 2011 International Symposium on Online Journalism to describe how the BBC’s iPhone and iPad news app had actually been built: with large ambitions and very little resource. “The outcome is a far cry from the one I had hoped for,” said Brannan, who had just left the corporation. In practice the app repurposed material from the BBC News website rather than doing anything native to the device.
What he said he wanted instead was a news service that was location aware and context aware, customisable, and drawing on media from both journalists and the audience.
He credited the then-new Sky News iPad app with playing to the strengths of the tablet format — “a decent, if limited, news experience” — but singled out Zite as the most innovative tablet app he had seen, because it tried to learn about individual readers through algorithms and the semantic web, much as supermarkets learn about their shoppers. Zite had by that point been sent a cease and desist notice by large media companies.