AMSTERDAM, 13 September 2024 — The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has announced Phase 1 of the IPTC Verified News Publishers List at the International Broadcast Convention (IBC).

The list uses C2PA technology to enable verified provenance for the news media industry. News outlets apply for a certificate from a partner Certificate Authority (currently Truepic), with the IPTC verifying the identity of the publisher. The certificate is then used by the news outlet to sign content, in accordance with the C2PA specification’s handling of “additional trust anchor stores”. This means that the news publisher is the signer of the content. This is a key requirement for many media outlets.

Currently the BBC (UK), CBC / Radio Canada (Canada) and broadcaster WDR (Germany) have certificates on the Verified News Publishers List. Many more publishers and broadcasters are currently in the process of obtaining a certificate. To register your interest as a news publisher, please fill out the Verified News Publisher expression of interest form.

To make the process of verifying and approving certificate requests transparent and accountable, the IPTC has released a set of policies for issuing Verified News Publisher certificates covering Phase 1 of the project. The process includes a “fast track” process for media organisations that are already well known to IPTC, and also a self-certification track. The policies were approved by the IPTC membership at a recent meeting of the IPTC Media Provenance Committee.

Verifying publisher identity, not trustworthiness

Note: as we have always made clear, the IPTC is making no claims about the truth or trustworthiness of content published by news publishers on the IPTC Verified News Publisher List. We simply verify that the publisher is “who they say they are”, and then the signature will verify that the content was published by that publisher, and has not been tampered with since the point of publishing.

We make it clear in the governance policies that a certificate can be revoked if the certificate’s private key has been compromised in some way, but we will not revoke certificates for editorial reasons.

Online verifier tool

The IPTC has worked with the BBC to launch a simple Verified News Publisher content verifier tool hosted at https://originverify.iptc.org. The tool displays a special indicator when content has been signed by an organisation whose certificate is on the Verified News Publisher list. The IPTC has also published a set of Verified News Publisher sample content that can be used with the verifier to demonstrate the process in action.

Sharing best practices, resources and knowledge among news publishers

For IPTC members, the Media Provenance Committee has created an internal members-only wiki detailing best practices and lessons learned while implementing C2PA and the Verified News Publisher List at broadcasters and publishers. Information on the wiki includes technical details on how to generate a certificate signing request to obtain a certificate, how to sign content with open-source and commercial tools, how to deal with publishing and distribution technology such as streaming servers and content delivery networks, and how to add metadata to C2PA assertions embedded in media content.

The Committee has also created a public-facing area of the IPTC site describing IPTC’s work in the area of Media Provenance, helping news publishers to get up to speed and understand how C2PA technology works and how it can be implemented in publishing workflows.

Other IPTC and Media Provenance-related events at IBC this weekend:

• Judy Parnall (BBC), Lead of the IPTC Media Provenance Advocacy Working Group, spoke on a panel on “Content Tracing and Provenance” this morning (Friday) at the AI Zone.
• Judy is also presenting a paper at the IBC Conference on Saturday 14 September: Provenance: What can we Trust?, along with IPTC Individual Member John Simmons.
• Combating disinformation in News: A critical year for democracies at the IPTC Conference on Saturday. Laura Ellis (BBC) is on the panel along with representatives from CBS and GLOBO.
• On Sunday 15 September, Judy presents IBC’s Accelerator Project “Design Your Weapons in Fight Against Disinformation” on the IBC Innovation Stage, along with tech leaders from CBS, Associated Press and ITN.