Media Release

BEIJING, (CHINA) -– Stuart Myles of the Associated Press has been elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of the International Press and Telecommunications Council (IPTC), succeeding Vincent Baby of Thomson Reuters, the IPTC announced Friday following its 49th Annual General Meeting held in Beijing (China).

Myles, 45, is Director of Information Management at the AP. He has worked in the news publishing industry since 1997, holding positions at Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal Online and Factiva, prior to joining the AP in 2008. He first became a delegate to the IPTC in 2000 and has helped to drive key news standards, including NITF, NewsML-G2, rNews, RightsML and News-in-JSON.

“IPTC holds a unique place at the intersection of news and technology. Its standards and the expertise of its membership are key to both the interchange of news and to the future development of the media industry”, said Myles. “It is a privilege to chair this organization and to follow in the footsteps of Vincent Baby, who has led it with distinction for the past three years.”

Following an invitation from its member Xinhua News Agency, the 23 delegates from around the world spent three days in working sessions, The Mobile Internet and Social Media Forum as well as conducting the official business of the IPTC.

The Mobile Internet and Social Media Forum, an open forum with Chinese social media and internet companies, including Weibo, Baidu, Xinhuanet, Aliyun and others, included presentations by IPTC members Thomson Reuters, Getty Images and the Jozef Stefan Institute of Slovenia. Attendees from the IPTC and from Chinese media companies spent an afternoon listening to presentations and in discussions about how to engage social media users and how to employ mobile and social media technologies in their respective businesses. 

The IPTC, based in London, brings together the world’s leading news agencies, publishers and industry vendors. It develops and promotes efficient technical standards to improve the management and exchange of information between content providers, intermediaries and consumers. The standards enable easy, cost-effective and rapid innovation and include the news exchange formats NewsML-G2, SportsML-G2 and NITF, rNews for marking up online news, the rights expression language RightsML, Photo Metadata standards, and NewsCodes taxonomies for categorizing news. Visit the web site www.iptc.org or follow @IPTC on Twitter.