The IPTC has an ongoing project to the news and media industry deal with content credibility and provenance. As part of this, we have started working with Project Origin, a consortium of news and technology organisations who have come together to fight misinformation through the use of content provenance technologies.

On Tuesday 22nd February, Managing Director of IPTC Brendan Quinn spoke on a panel at an invite-only Executive Briefing event attended by leaders from news organisations around the world.

Other speakers at the event included Marc Lavallee, Head of R&D for The New York Times, Pascale Doucet of France Télévision, Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research, Andy Parsons of Adobe, and Laura Ellis, Jamie Angus and Jatin Aythora of the BBC.

The event marks the beginning of the next phase of the industry’s work on content credibility. C2PA has now delivered the 1.0 version of its spec, so the next phase of the work is for the news industry to get together to create best practices around implementing it in news workflows.

IPTC and Project Origin will be working together with stakeholders from all parts of the news industry to establish guidelines for making provenance work in a practical way across the entire news ecosystem.

We have just released a small update to the Media Topics controlled vocabulary for news and media content. The changes support the Winter Olympics which starts this week.

The changes are:

• The definition of bobsleigh (medtop:20000854) was changed to reflect the fact that bobsleigh now offers a one-person version (which is incidentally referred to as “monobob”). The new definition is: One, two or four people racing down a course in a sled that consists of a main hull, a frame, two axles and sets of runners. The total time of all heats in a competition is added together to determine the winner.
• Similarly, the definition of freestyle skiing (medtop:20001058) was changed to reflect new events this year. The new definition is: Skiing competitions which, in contrast to alpine skiing, incorporate acrobatic moves and jumps. Events include aerials, halfpipe, slopestyle, ski cross, moguls and big air.

We also took the opportunity to add a term which was recently suggested by ABC Australia and Fourth Estate in the US:

• tsunami (medtop:20001353), child of medtop:20000151 natural disaster – High and powerful ocean waves caused by an underwater land disturbance, such as an earthquake or volcanic eruption, known to cause significant damage and loss when they hit land

We would like to thank to all Media Topics users and maintainers for their feedback and support.