The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), based in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...

, is a

consortium A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources ...

of the world's major

news agencies A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and radio and television broadcasters. A news agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire, ...

, other news providers and news industry vendors and acts as the global standards body of the news media. Currently more than 50 companies and organizations from the news industry are members of the IPTC, including global players like

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. new ...

(AP),

Agence France-Presse Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French international news agency headquartered in Paris, France. Founded in 1835 as Havas, it is the world's oldest news agency. AFP has regional headquarters in Nicosia, Montevideo, Hong Kong and Washington, ...

(AFP),

Deutsche Presse-Agentur Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (dpa) is a German news agency founded in 1949. Based in Hamburg, it has grown to be a major worldwide operation serving print media, radio, television, online, mobile phones, and national news agencies. News is ava ...

(dpa), BBC,

Getty Images Getty Images Holdings, Inc. is an American visual media company and is a supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video and music for business and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets. It targets three markets—creativ ...

Press Association PA Media (formerly the Press Association) is a multimedia news agency, and the national news agency of the United Kingdom and Ireland. It is part of PA Media Group Limited, a private company with 26 shareholders, most of whom are national and re ...

(PA),

Reuters Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency was est ...

and ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

''. IPTC aims at simplifying the distribution of information. To achieve this technical standards are developed to improve the management and exchange of information between content providers, intermediaries and consumers. IPTC is committed to open standards and makes all standards freely available to its members and the wider community. The IPTC was established in 1965 by a group of news organisations including the Alliance Européenne des Agences de Presse (EANA), American Newspaper Publishers Association (then ANPA, now NAA), Fédération Internationale des Editeurs de Journaux (now

WAN-IFRA The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization made up of 76 national newspaper associations, 12 news agencies, 10 regional press organisations, and many individual newspaper ex ...

) and the North American News Agencies (a joint committee of

Canadian Press The Canadian Press (CP; french: La Presse canadienne, ) is a Canadian national news agency headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. Established in 1917 as a vehicle for the time's Canadian newspapers to exchange news and information, The Canadian Pre ...

and

United Press International United Press International (UPI) is an American international news agency whose newswires, photo, news film, and audio services provided news material to thousands of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations for most of the 2 ...

) to safeguard the telecommunications interests of the world's press.

IPTC Standards

Photo metadata

The IPTC defined a set of

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

properties that can be applied to images, part of a broader standard developed in the early 1990s and known as the

IPTC Information Interchange Model The Information Interchange Model (IIM) is a file structure and set of metadata attributes that can be applied to text, images and other media types. It was developed in the early 1990s by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) ...

(IIM). Embedded IIM image information is often referred to as an "IPTC header". This basic set of metadata fields is branded as ''IPTC Core'', in 2008 a second set branded as ''IPTC Extension'' was developed. The

Extensible Metadata Platform The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is an ISO standard, originally created by Adobe Systems Inc., for the creation, processing and interchange of standardized and custom metadata for digital documents and data sets. XMP standardizes a data ...

(XMP) has largely superseded IIM's image file header structure, but the properties of the IPTC Core are synchronized between the technical structures of XMP and IIM by a vast majority of imaging software. Because of its nearly universal acceptance among photographers — even amateurs — this is by far IPTC's most widely used standard.

IPTC NewsML-G2-Standards Family

Using XML and the W3C's model for the Semantic Web, in 2008 IPTC launched a new series of standards that feature modular construction and many opportunities for embedding metadata. This allows developers to build applications that use only the parts of the IPTC NewsML-G2-Standards that are required by the customer, and that reduce programming costs by re-using XML and metadata modules. Further the NewsML-G2-Standards extend the scope of exchange formats beyond news content, they include event data and well organised information about persons, organisations, points of interest, geopolitical areas or abstract concepts. These members of the family of standards are available now: NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and SportsML-G2. Although they have different roles within the news industry they share much of the date model and the same XML coding.

NewsML-G2

NewsML-G2 acts as an envelope and organizer so that news providers can create single news items — text, photos, video or anything else — and bundle them into concise cohesive packages than can be automatically processed by web CMSs or newsroom systems. The content and relationships of the individual news items can be described using a rich set of

. NewsML-G2 is not a text or image mark-up format. For example, it does not contain paragraph or headline tagging. Rather, it is an envelope and organizer that does not, by itself, act as a content format. For text article formatting, IPTC mentions

News Industry Text Format News Industry Text Format (NITF) is an XML specification designed to standardize the content and structure of individual text news articles. Usage The NITF specification defines a standard way to mark up an article's content and structure, as wel ...

(NITF) or

XHTML Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages. It mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated. While HTML, prior ...

as common examples. NewsML-G2 is used by several large international

, including Agence France-Presse, Associated Press,

Austria Presse Agentur The Austria Press Agency (german: Austria Presse Agentur, APA) is the national news agency and the leading information provider in Austria. It is owned by Austrian newspapers and the national broadcaster ORF. Journalists Fatalities See als ...

, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Fourth Estate, Thomson Reuters, and others.

EventsML-G2

EventsML-G2 optimises the sharing of event information such as meetings, sports events, elections, and even rocket launches — virtually any announced activity that can be broadly classified as an "event." Using XML and metadata, EventsML-G2 allows news providers to create rich descriptions of events plus information about planned coverage, and then share that information with web sites, databases, newsrooms or other customers. EventsML-G2 is not a calendaring standard, but rather a way for news agencies to share event information to populate their own calendars. The events need not have fixed starting or ending dates, nor do they even need to have a fixed length.

SportsML-G2

SportsML-G2 is a convenient way to share sports statistics in a concise, unambiguous way. All major sports are supported, and certain sports that are known for rich or especially complex statistics (such as

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding t ...

) can use special add-on modules. SportsML-G2 has found wide usage outside the news industry; among the user communities are sports teams,

fantasy sports A fantasy sport (also known less commonly as rotisserie or roto) is a game, often played using the Internet, where participants assemble imaginary or virtual teams composed of proxies of real players of a professional sport. These teams compete bas ...

leagues, sports betting firms and sports historians. SportsML-G2 is the newer sibling of

SportsML The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), based in London, United Kingdom, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, other news providers and news industry vendors and acts as the global standards body of the news media. ...

. Version 2.0 of SportsML-G2 was released in October 2008.

NewsCodes

NewsCodes is the brand name of the set of

Controlled Vocabularies Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controlling ...

created and maintained by IPTC. One group of NewsCodes can be used to classify news content - regardless of the media type - and another set is used to support the functionality of IPTC's news exchange format standards.

Media Topics

The Media Topics is the IPTC's recommended controlled vocabulary for classifying media content by topic. Around 1,200 terms in a hierarchy describe the subject of news content in a generic, international way. The IPTC created Media Topics in 2010 as a successor to the IPTC'S previous subject taxonomy, SubjectCodes. The Media Topics vocabulary is actively maintained by the IPTC NewsCodes Working Group. Updates are released every two to three months including new terms and clarifications to existing terms. Translations of the Media Topics vocabulary are available in 12 languages and language variants: American English (en-US), Arabic (ar), Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR), British English (en-GB), Danish (dk), French (fr), German (de), Norwegian (no), Portuguese (pt-PT), Simplified Chinese (zh-Hans), Spanish (es) and Swedish (se).

NewsML 1

NewsML 1 is an XML standard developed by the IPTC to provide a media-independent, structural enveloping framework for multi-media news. It has also been adopted as

Japanese Industrial Standards are the standards used for industrial activities in Japan, coordinated by the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) and published by the Japanese Standards Association (JSA). The JISC is composed of many nationwide committees and pla ...

(JIS) X7201:2005. Although superseded in 2008 by NewsML-G2, NewsML 1 (as the original NewsML is now known) remains popular outside North America (especially in Asia) and IPTC plans to support this standard as ''NewsML 1.x'' indefinitely.

ninjs

ninjs standardizes the representation of news in

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other se ...

- a data interchange format. The format covers the data interchange by APIs and documents in

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content ( content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

s like search engines.

NITF - News Industry Text Format

(NITF) is an XML specification published by the IPTC that is designed to standardize the content and structure of text-based news articles.

RightsML

RightsML is IPTC's

Rights Expression Language A Rights Expression Language or REL is a machine-processable language used to express intellectual property rights (such as copyright) and other terms and conditions for use over content. RELs can be used as standalone expressions (i.e. metadata usa ...

for news media and is based on

ODRL The Open Digital Rights Language (''ODRL'') is a policy expression language that provides a flexible and interoperable information model, vocabulary, and encoding mechanisms for representing statements about the usage of content and services. ODRL ...

rNews

rNews is a standard for using semantic markup to annotate online news. It defines a data model for embedding machine-readable publishing metadata in web documents and a set of suggested implementations. Some properties of this standard have been adopted by

Schema.org Schema.org is a reference website that publishes documentation and guidelines for using structured data mark-up on web-pages (called microdata). Its main objective is to standardize HTML tags to be used by webmasters for creating rich results (di ...

for its metadata schema.

SportsML

SportsML is an XML news exchange standard for sharing sports statistics in a concise, unambiguous way. All major sports are supported, and certain sports that are known for rich or especially complex statistics (such as

) can use special add-on modules. SportsML has found wide usage outside the news industry; among the user communities are sports teams,

leagues, sports betting firms and sports historians. In June 2008, the IPTC approved SportsML-G2 as a parallel standard to SportsML. Although SportsML-G2 is built from standardized XML modules that are used by other IPTC G2 standards, both standards effectively accomplish the same task.

IPTC 7901

IPTC 7901 is still a widely used format for plain text news, despite being 30 years old. It is a close relative of the

Newspaper Association of America The News Media Alliance (formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America until 2016ANPA-1312, and uses similar control and other special characters to create a file that can be used to drive computerized news editing systems, photo typesetters or even

teleprinter A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Init ...

machines.