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Last week, the IPTC community gathered in Toronto for our 2026 Spring Meeting, held from Monday 13th to Wednesday 15th April at the Reuters offices downtown. Three days of working group updates, guest presentations, and lively discussion were capped off by a fantastic tour of the CBC studios, newsroom, production facilities and archives.
Huge thanks to Thomson Reuters for hosting us, and to CBC / Radio-Canada for opening their doors to us on Wednesday afternoon.
A community of standards-makers
IPTC brings together people from news agencies, broadcasters, publishers, photo libraries, technology vendors, universities and standards bodies — all of whom share a common goal of making media work better through open standards and good metadata.
That community aspect shone through this week. One first-time attendee captured it perfectly: “I’ve found my people.” For those of us who have been coming to IPTC meetings for years, that sentiment is exactly why we keep showing up. There’s nowhere else quite like it for the kind of work we do.
Day 1: AI, licensing, and provenance
After a warm welcome from IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn and IPTC Chair Robert Schmidt-Nia, and a round of member introductions, Monday’s agenda zeroed in on some of the most pressing questions facing media organisations today.
Sannuta Raghu kicked things off with a presentation on the News Atom project, followed by Sebastian Posth on CommonsDB and Fair AI Attribution — a proposed framework for ensuring content creators are properly credited when their work is used in AI systems. Leonard Rosenthol then gave us an update on the C2PA ecosystem, setting the stage for broader discussions about provenance and trust that would run throughout the week.
Brendan Quinn presented the latest on IPTC’s AI Opt-Out Guidelines and the ongoing work at the IETF AI Preferences Working Group, which also happened to be meeting in Toronto this week. Next, Eckart Walther gave a deep dive into the possibilities of Really Simple Licensing, which is closely related to IPTC’s initiatives for expressing licensing terms in a machine-readable format.
The day closed with an extended discussion on AI opt-out, reflecting just how central these questions have become for publishers trying to navigate a rapidly-shifting landscape.
Day 2: Working group updates and new ideas
Tuesday opened with Brendan demonstrating the new IPTC member portal, followed by a packed day of working group updates:
- Video Metadata WG — Pam Fisher
- News in JSON WG — Ian Young (PA Media / Alamy)
- NewsML-G2 WG — Dave Compton (London Stock Exchange Group)
- Photo Metadata WG — David Riecks (PLUS Coalition)
- Sports Content WG / Atomic News — Paul Kelly
We also heard from Dongyan Zhao (Peking University / Xinhua News Agency) on the AI LLM discussion group, and Scott Yates of JournalList presented on Publisher Info and trust.txt — a simple but powerful approach to publisher transparency on the web.
Day 3: Provenance, watermarking, and a tour of CBC
Wednesday began with Jennifer Parrucci (New York Times) presenting on the NewsCodes WG, followed by Marcos Armstrong of CBC / Radio Canada reporting on the IPTC Media Provenance Best Practices Working Group’s project to map out a standardised blueprint for implementing C2PA in real media workflows.
Paul Harman of Bloomberg led the Standards Committee meeting where we discussed several new working group proposals, and Marc Gray of SonicOrigin gave a fascinating presentation on the state of the art in watermarking — a topic that continues to grow in importance as a counterpart to C2PA in content provenance workflows.
After lunch, Bruce MacCormack, Judy Parnall (BBC) and Charlie Halford (BBC) led the Media Provenance Committee meeting, before we decamped to CBC/Radio-Canada for an insider’s tour of the studios, newsroom, production facilities and archives. Seeing the scale of a major broadcaster’s operation, and how metadata and provenance challenges play out in practice, was a perfect way to end the meeting.
Looking ahead
Alongside the regular working group updates, members discussed proposals for new working groups and discussion groups focused on AI and LLMs in the media, Publisher Transparency, and the emerging idea of Atomic News / Liquid News. We’ll have more to share on these initiatives in the coming weeks.
Huge thanks to everyone who presented, contributed to discussions, and made the journey to Toronto. This is what IPTC does best: bringing people together to share best practices and build the standards that keep the media ecosystem running.
The IPTC Spring Meeting brought together over 80 participants from around the world – over 40 physically present in Toronto, Canada, hosted by IPTC member Reuters.
An updated version of the IPTC’s Origin Verify C2PA validator tool was also released. The new version shows whether content was signed by an organisation with a certificate on the C2PA Trust List, the IPTC Verified News Publisher List or the C2PA Trust List.
“Thanks to Scott Perry and the team at the C2PA Conformance Program, we have been able to create one of the first content signing tools with a certificate on the C2PA Trust List,” said IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn. “Now that we have gone through the entire conformance procedure, we can share our hard-won knowledge with IPTC members and others to help them to get their own signing tools through conformance testing.”
Brendan will talk about the process IPTC underwent to obtain C2PA Conformance at the IPTC Media Provenance Summit, which will be held this Thursday 16th April, also at Reuters Toronto.
Access the updated guidelines here on the IPTC website.
This version addresses the rapidly evolving AI landscape by incorporating two protocols that were introduced in late 2025:
- Really Simple Licensing (RSL) specification
- Cloudflare’s Content Signals protocol
The new version also includes some formatting changes to make the recommendations easier to understand and implement, and adds a chapter with suggested User Agent IDs to use in robots.txt files.
While the IPTC continues to advocate for a formal global standard through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), these guidelines provide a practical, immediate framework for publishers to protect their rights today.
The IPTC advocates for a usable, practical AI usage protocol to be explicitly acknowledged
by law… we have created this guidance document to show how current
technologies can be used to reserve the rights of content creators.
A Call for Industry Participation
The IPTC has joined the IETF AI Preferences Working Group to ensure the interests of rights holders are represented. This comes at a critical time: as the Open Future Foundation’s January 2026 study highlights, the group faces significant challenges in reaching an agreed position. Without active participation from the media and content industries, there is a risk that the final specification will fail to address the sector’s specific requirements.
In the absence of a formal industry standard, RSL or Content Signals may become de facto solutions. While these proprietary technologies may offer short-term utility for the content industry, the IPTC believes that a formal, open standard is a better long-term outcome. A multi-stakeholder process via an organisation such as the IETF ensures that the needs of all parties — publishers, rights holders, AI developers, tech platforms and civil society — are balanced in a transparent and sustainable way.
IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn presented on IPTC’s work in content provenance and authenticity at the Reimagining DAM conference in Munich, Germany, last week.
The conference is organised by Digital Asset Management software vendor (and IPTC Associate Member) Fotoware for its customers and others in the industry who are interested in their work.
As Fotoware’s Chief Product and Technology Officer Janniche Moe said in her introduction, we are now in a world where we can’t answer the most basic questions about content: “Where did this come from? Can we use it? Can we trust it?”
C2PA, and the IPTC’s work to make it workable for the media industry, addresses that problem.
Quinn’s presentation focused on the threat of fake news and misinformation to the media industry, how C2PA can solve the problem, and how IPTC is helping media companies to implement C2PA Content Credentials in a simple way by “stamping” content with their publisher signature.
To learn more on this topic, attend the IPTC Spring Meeting and the IPTC Media Provenance Summit in Toronto, Canada in April 2026.
In collaboration with CBC / Radio-Canada, the IPTC is hosting the next Media Provenance Summit, which takes place at the Reuters building in Toronto, Canada on Thursday 16 April, 2026.
A small number of attendee places are still available. Those interested in attending can fill out the form at the event page. Preference will be given to representatives of the media industry in the USA and Canada.
All the greatest minds on C2PA in one place
We are honoured to have some of the most respected figures in the world of C2PA and content authenticity in the room for the event.
Here is a selection of our speakers:
- Angela Pacienza, Executive Editor at The Globe and Mail and Board member of the Online News Association (ONA) will be speaking about the need for C2PA and content authenticity technology at news providers
- Dan Dzuban, Head of Strategic Partners, Content Authenticity at Sony Corporation and Acting Chair of the Coalition for Content Providence and Authenticity (C2PA) will speak about the latest work of C2PA and where things are heading in 2026 and beyond
- Andy Parsons, Global Head of Content Authenticity at Adobe Systems, Inc. and lead of the Content Authenticity Initiative will speak about his work leading the Conformance Program, driving adoption across industries and building support for C2PA across the Adobe product suite
- Kate Kaye, Deputy Director of World Privacy Forum will shine a light on security and privacy issues that are being considered during the rollout of C2PA Content Credentials and related technologies
- Judy Parnall, Head of Standards & Industry, BBC Research & Development at the British Broadcasting Corporation and Steering Committee member of C2PA and Laura Ellis, Head of Technology Forecasting at BBC will speak about the BBC’s work in content authenticity and C2PA, including the work of BBC Verify
- Marianne Fjellhaug, Senior Project Manager at Media Cluster Norway will be speaking about her work with Project Reynir analysing workflows and commissioning user experience research on how users perceive Content Credentials and how it influences their trust of news brands
- Marcos Armstrong, Senior Specialist of Content Provenance and Integrity at CBC / Radio Canada will be speaking about his work on planning C2PA touchpoints across CBC’s newsroom workflows
- Bruce MacCormack, Chair, Media Provenance Committee at IPTC and Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC will be speaking about the IPTC’s efforts to bring C2PA Content Credentials, and provenance technology generally, to the global news media industry
- Tim Murphy, CEO, co-founder of Pixelstream who will be speaking about CAWG and how publishers can make use of Identity Assertions in C2PA
- Mohamed Badr Taddist, C2PA Project Manager at the European Broadcasting Union, Sebastien Testeau, CBC / Radio Canada and Marcos Armstrong from CBC will be speaking about a case study project they are running using Sony broadcast cameras through newsroom production workflows
More information about the event can be found at the event website.
The IPTC and CBC/Radio-Canada thank Reuters for providing the event venue and Getty Images for sponsoring catering at the event.
Indicator, an online publication focusing on studying and exposing digital deception and manipulation, has published an updated analysis of how Generative AI tools output are shown on social media platforms.
The study, an update to a previous study conducted in October, shows some good news: for example, all image and video content created by OpenAI models was correctly labeled as AI-generated by LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.
However, some significant gaps remain.
For example, some images from Meta AI were recognised as AI-generated by Instagram, but they were not recognised by LinkedIn, TikTok or YouTube. Meta AI uses IPTC’s Digital Source Type property in the media file’s XMP header (the typical way to use IPTC Photo Metadata) to signal AI-generated content, so this means that the IPTC DigitalSourceType property is not being examined by these platforms.
OpenAI and Google Gemini both use C2PA metadata to assert digital source type (also using IPTC’s Digital Source Type vocabulary, but this time embedded in a C2PA manifest). However Pinterest, for example, only picked up OpenAI’s version of the C2PA metadata, but not Google’s. Pinterest did surface Meta AI’s content via the IPTC Digital Source Type tag, and was equal-best overall, tying with LinkedIn who recognised all content from Google and OpenAI but not from Meta.
IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn was quoted in the article as saying “Tech platforms have the talent to implement C2PA tomorrow; they simply need the will to prioritize it.”
Why not both?
On the creation side, OpenAI and Google Gemini declare AI-generated content using IPTC’s Digital Source Type vocabulary embedded in a C2PA manifest. (Unfortunately they each use different versions of the C2PA spec, so results are not consistent across all social media platforms, even those that read C2PA metadata.)
Meta AI uses the same vocabulary, embedded in the Digital Source type property in “regular” IPTC embedded photo metadata.
We would recommend that all AI engines uses both techniques, to give their AI disclosure information the greatest chance of being surfaced by all platforms.
On the consumption side, it seems that Instagram examines the IPTC DigitalSourceType property but not C2PA. Conversely, LinkedIn examines C2PA but not IPTC. Pinterest seems to be the only platform that looks at both, but it’s implementation doesn’t analyse the more complex C2PA metadata assertions used by Google, meaning that it only surfaces OpenAI’s simpler implementation.
“Whether they want to or not,” platforms are “just going to have to deal with this”
The article noted that looming legislation from California and other jurisdictions would force platforms to implement AI surfacing properly, but in the meantime there is a risk: Maurice Jakesch, assistant professor of computational social science at Bauhaus-University in Weimar, is reported as saying that “an inconsistent and incomplete labeling setup may have unexpected consequences on online trust.”
Bruce MacCormack of Neural Transform, who has worked with CBC/Radio-Canada on establishing C2PA, joined a panel in Geneva launching an initiative from the World Intellectual Property Organisation: the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Initiative (AIII).
Pronounced “A triple I”, the initiative seeks to bring together representatives from creators and rights holders across industries to work on a common approach to ensuring that creatives are compensated for AI use of their content.
Bruce MacCormack is Chair of IPTC’s Media Provenance Committee, which is working on bringing C2PA technology to the news media industry. Bruce spoke about how his experience at CBC in establishing C2PA can help to bring the industry together to create a set of policies and technical solutions to address an industry-wide problem.
A featured speaker was award-winning musical artist Imogen Heap, who spoke about the importance of metadata for the music industry and creatives generally and of her Auracles project bringing artist data together . Asked if she was optimistic about the future of creative industries, Heap said that she had to be hopeful, because the livelihoods so so many creatives across so many art forms depended on it.
Other speakers at the event included Chris Horton of Universal Music Group, Mark Isherwood of music interoperability standard DDEX, Ana da Motta, Senior Manager Digital Affairs & Artificial Intelligence for Amazon Web Services, Alessandra Sala, Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, Shutterstock, along with Ulrike Till, Director and Kenichiro Natsume, Assistant Director General of WIPO.
AI in the Newsroom: A High-Level Panel
Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of the IPTC, joined a high-level panel to explore the transformative impact of AI on the global media landscape. He was joined on stage by Peter Kropsch, CEO of Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) and Earl J. Wilkinson, CEO of the International News Media Association (INMA). The session was moderated by Najlaa Habriri, Senior Editor and Political Commentator at Asharq Al-Awsat, a Saudi newspaper based in London.
Key Discussion Points
The wide-ranging conversation addressed how news organisations can navigate the “smart media” era:
- Content Control: Leveraging technical standards to help publishers retain rights and control over their output.
- Editorial Integrity: Integrating AI into workflows while safeguarding accuracy, accountability, and editorial responsibility.
- The Modern Newsroom: How hybrid roles, blending editorial, data, and audience expertise, are reshaping recruitment and staff development.
International representation
The forum featured many speakers from the international media industry, including Ben Smith (Semafor), Tony Gallagher (The Times), Karen Elliott House (formerly of The Wall Street Journal), Julie Pace (Associated Press) and Vincent Peyrègne (formerly of WAN-IFRA), alongside prominent local media leaders from across the Middle East.
Following on from these events, the IPTC is proud to announce that the next Media Provenance Summit will take place in Toronto Canada on April 16th 2026 at the Reuters offices.
Bringing C2PA implementation experts together from media organisations in North America and beyond, the Media Provenance Summit will look at real-world implementation of C2PA media provenance technologies in newsrooms.
Agenda
Topics will include:
- Best-practice workflows for image and video production, from capture and ingest through to publishing and distribution
- Understanding how to use organisational identity certificates and tools that conform to the C2PA Conformance Program to achieve full compliance with the C2PA specification, enabling visibility of both C2PA conformance and publisher identity in C2PA validators
- Adopting and integrating software and hardware that incorporates C2PA signing into newsroom systems and workflows
Attendees and speakers
Attendees will include senior technology, editorial and product professionals from media organisations, global news agencies, technology suppliers (both hardware and software), service providers and industry bodies. For comparison, the summit in Bergen in September 2025 had over 80 attendees from the UK, Europe, Canada, USA, Australia and Japan.
IPTC membership is not required to attend the Media Provenance Summit.
The event is being held the day after the members-only IPTC Spring Meeting 2026, which will be held at the same venue from April 13 – 15. Attendees of the IPTC Spring Meeting will include technology professionals from Associated Press, Bloomberg, New York Times, Reuters, BBC and many more leading media organisations from around the world. Many of these attendees are expected to also attend the Media Provenance Summit.
Request an invitation
To be considered for an invitation, please fill out the Expression of Interest form. Attendees will be selected to ensure a productive balance of publishers, broadcasters, tool vendors and consultants.
Selected attendees will be notified by the end of February, to give sufficient notice for planning travel arrangements.
IPTC’s Managing Director Brendan Quinn spoke at the event Breaking the News? Global perspectives on the future of journalism in the age of AI in Berlin on Wednesday 28th January, an event organised by Deutsche Welle Akademie, an arm of IPTC member Deutsche Welle.
Barbara Massing, Director General, Deutsche Welle gave the opening presentation where she emphasised that all news organisations depended on earning, and keeping, the trust of their audience: “Trust is not a given. It must be earned. Every single day.”
Reem Alabali Radovan, Germany’s Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, gave her thoughts on the importance of media companies to global democracy.
Courtney Radsch of the the Open Markets Institute gave a keynote presentation where she encouraged media organisations to hold strong against the narrative pushed by AI vendors, asking them not to give in to the jargon of the industry. AI tools do not have “hallucinations”, they make “fabrications.”
IPTC’s Brendan Quinn spoke on a panel on the relationship between AI vendors and publishers, along with representatives from Open AI and Cloudflare (other AI companies were invited to attend but declined the invitation). Quinn spoke about the IPTC’s AI opt-out guidelines and discussed the complicated landscape and the lack of progress in the IETF AI Preferences Working Group, as documented in a recent Open Future Foundation paper.
A report from Deutsche Welle on the event summarised the following takeaways:
- Collaboration and solidarity: Media companies only have power together
- Tech companies need to be regulated – they won’t self-regulate
- Media need a clear understanding of tech business models
- Media can and should use public-interest AI tools
- We need a better dialogue with big tech – demonisation won’t help
- Journalism must be treated as critical infrastructure, not just an industry
Thanks to Deutsche Welle Akademie for hosting the event and inviting Brendan Quinn to speak.