Hi everyone,

It is now just over 80 days since I took on the IPTC Managing Director role on the 1st of June, so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on my experience so far.

I actually started my IPTC “life” in April at the IPTC 2018 Spring Meeting in Athens, Greece – thankfully my previous project allowed me to go to Athens for a few days to meet everyone and see first hand how an IPTC face-to-face meeting works. Everyone was very friendly and welcoming, and I look forward to seeing many familiar and new faces at the Autumn 2018 meeting in Toronto – the hotel booking link will be released in the next few days so keep an eye out! And if you’re not an IPTC member but you’re interested in speaking or attending, see the call for participation for the IPTC Toronto meeting that we released recently and please do get in touch.

Having worked for many media companies over the years – building content management and syndication systems at Fairfax Media and the BBC, working on long and short term projects for various media organisations (Associated Press, TV3 Ireland, BBC Worldwide and Newsworks) and co-founding a startup in the industry (NewsFixed, since acquired by Paydesk) – I have a broad background in the technology side of the media industry. So it’s great to work with some of those organisations plus many more, helping to set the standards that bring the industry together.

Working with the previous MD Michael Steidl has been a breeze. His care and attention to detail meant that handover was very easy, and hopefully I can continue to uphold the high standards that he has set. I wish him the best of luck in enjoying his retirement, and am very thankful that he has offered to stay on as chair of the IPTC Photo Metadata and Video Metadata working groups!

When most people in the industry think of IPTC, they probably think of the technical standards or the controlled vocabularies – but I really see IPTC as a group of people from companies across the news and media industry who are working together to solve the sorts of problems that can only be solved by working together. I really hope that we can continue to work together to solve more problems in the future. If you have ideas, please get in touch – I can be reached at mdirector@iptc.org.

I also plan to get out to many industry events and conferences to meet and learn from people from the industry who may or may not be IPTC members. Thanks to those I have already met at the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference co-located with CEPIC in Berlin in May, the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management conference in London in June, and I’m looking forward to going to the IBC Conference in Amsterdam in September.

Taking on the role with IPTC has coincided with another change in my life: as the MD role is remote, my wife and I took the opportunity to move to my wife’s home town, the tech hotspot of Tallinn, Estonia. We’re having a great time getting settled here, and if you ever happen to be in Tallinn, please get in touch, I would love to show you around!

Brendan Quinn
IPTC Managing Director

After a successful IPTC Spring Meeting in Athens and IPTC Photo Metadata Conference in Berlin (see Sarah Saunders’ write-up of the event), we’re currently hard at work planning the IPTC Autumn 2018 Meeting. This year’s Autumn meeting and AGM will be held from 15-17 October in Toronto, Canada.

We’re currently considering topics for the agenda and organisations to invite, so we’re inviting suggestions from members and the industry. Recent topics discussed at IPTC Meetings include 360-degree images, rights management, blockchain and the media industry, non-XML news standards such as NinJS and much more. We want to focus on how we can use technology and technical standards to make the news and media industry function more smoothly.

Registration opens in August. We look forward to seeing as many members as possible attending.

If you’re interested in joining IPTC so that you can attend, or if you’re interested in presenting some relevant work to some of the top technical specialists in the media industry, please submit a short abstract of your presentation topic to Brendan Quinn, IPTC Managing Director at mdirector@iptc.org.

Earlier this year, we announced the arrival of Brendan Quinn, the new managing director of the International Press Telecommunications Council.

And while we’re thrilled to welcome Brendan to his new role, we’d be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to honour the man whom he’ll be replacing: Michael Steidl, who is retiring from the IPTC after 15 years.

Michael joined IPTC in the beginning of 2003 after two decades working as a journalist, managing director for news agencies and information technology consultant for news providers.

Upon his arrival, he pledged to do one thing, recalled IPTC Board Chairman Stuart Myles in a tribute at the recent IPTC Spring Meeting 2018.

Michael didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but to simply continue the good work of the previous director and “add some extra shades of colour” to IPTC’s image as a leader in news industry standards.

Of course, Michael did more than just add a few extra shades. Myles said:

“In fact, I would say that Michael’s contributions to the IPTC is really more equivalent to an entirely new artistic movement – a sort of Renaissance for the organisation – including managing the introduction of entirely new ways of operating the IPTC. When Michael started, there were no teleconferences or video conferences or even development of standards through email lists. There was no internet available during the meetings – which has perhaps been a mixed blessing, since people can keep up with the work back home, but we aren’t always as focussed.”

Klaus Sprick, a former IPTC board member who has been involved with the organisation for nearly 50 years, said the council – and the industry as a whole – owes Michael a debt.

“He is THE key person in IPTC to have moved it forward,” Sprick said. “IPTC is now, thanks to his efforts, the only respected and acknowledged organisation setting standards in international press information technology: media topics, subject codes, metadata, formats.”

Michael has called his time with the IPTC a great experience, adding he was happy to have been involved with the development and launch of nine new standards, the new Media Topic taxonomy and other vocabularies, and in his role in setting up new formats for face-to-face meetings and the creation of new kinds of meetings.

“Being in contact with our membership is also part of the bright side of my IPTC life and I enjoyed spreading the word about IPTC and its work among people knowing only little or nothing about our organisation.”

Prior to joining IPTC, Michael spent 11 years as managing director of Kathpress, where he had also worked as journalist. He has also worked as vice press officer for Medienstelle ED Wien, and as a freelance reporter for ORF.

We wish Michael a very happy retirement and thank him once again for the work he’s done to bring the IPTC to where it is today.

The International Press Telecommunications Council is happy to announce that RightsML, IPTC’s Rights Expression Language for the media industry, has been updated to version 2.0.

RightsML allows publishers and media owners to express rights permissions and obligations based on geographic, time-based, and monetary restrictions.

This version contains major updates: it is now based on W3C’s Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) version 2.2 which became a W3C recommendation in February 2018.

ODRL allows content providers to “express permission, prohibition, and obligation statements to be associated to content.” RightsML extends on that base to provide standard expressions for geographic and time-based constraints, on a requirement to pay fixed amounts of money for use of the content, 

An example RightsML model which expresses that EPA (Example Press Agency) grants its partners geographic rights to distribute a content item in Germany is as follows:

Policy:
  type: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/Set"
  uid: "http://example.com/RightsML/policy/idGeog1"
  profile: "https://iptc.org/std/RightsML/odrl-profile/"
  permission:
    - target: "urn:newsml:example.com:20120101:180106-999-000013"
      assigner: "http://example.com/cv/party/epa"
      assignee:
        type: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/PartyCollection"
        uid: "http://example.com/cv/partygroup/epapartners"
      action: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/distribute"
      constraint:
      - leftOperand: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/spatial"
        operator: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/eq"
        rightOperand: "http://cvx.iptc.org/iso3166-1a3/DEU"

This content model can also be expressed in XML or JSON. See the RightsML Simple geographic Example for more information.

More examples are on the RightsML 2.0 Examples page on the IPTC developer site.

IPTC has also created tools to help implementors understand and implement RightsML 2.0, including a generic guideline flow for evaluating ODRL documents and a RightsML policy builder tool.

For more details and help on implementing RightsML within your organisation, please join the IPTC RightsML mailing list. Membership of the group is open to the public. For discussion on developing further versions of the standard, please use the IPTC RightsML-dev list, open to all IPTC members.

By Jennifer Parrucci from IPTC member New York Times

The NewsCodes Working Group has been tirelessly working on a project to review the definitions of all terms in the MediaTopics vocabulary.

The motivation behind this work is feedback received from members using the vocabulary that some definitions are unclear, confusing or not grammatically correct. Additionally, some labels have also been found to be outdated or insensitive and have been changed.

Changing these definitions and labels is not meant to completely change the usage of the terms. Definition and label changes are meant to refine and clarify the usage.

While reviewing each definition the members of the working group have considered various factors, including whether the definition is clear, whether the definition uses the label to define itself (not very helpful) and whether there are typos or grammatical errors in the definition. Additionally, definitions were made more consistent and examples were added when possible.

Once these changes were made in English, the French, Spanish and German translations were also updated.

Currently, updates are available for three branches of Media Topics:

• arts, culture and entertainment
• weather
• conflict, war and peace

Updates can be viewed in cv format on cv.iptc.org or in the tree view on show.newscodes.org.

The working group plans to continue working on the definition review and periodically release more updates as they become available.

As announced in late April, Brendan Quinn is succeeding Michael Steidl in the position of Managing Director of IPTC in June 2018.

This change is happening right now: Brendan has taken over the responsibilities and actions of the Managing Director and Michael is available for giving advice to Brendan until the end of June.

From now on Brendan should be contacted as Managing Director. He uses the same email address that Michael used before: mdirector@iptc.org.

Note from Brendan

I’m really looking forward to working with all IPTC’s members and friends, and hope that I can make a real difference to the future of the news and media industry through my work with IPTC.

I aim to speak with as many of you as possible over the next weeks and months to find out what you as members like and don’t like about what IPTC is doing, but in the meantime, please feel free to email me via mdirector@iptc.org or find me on the members-only Slack group, and I would be happy to say hello and to hear your thoughts.

Michael and I sat down to hand over the role in early June so I now have a sense of the task before me, and I hope that I can follow up on his work but also bring a fresh energy to the organisation.

I would especially like to thank Michael for all his efforts over the last 15 years in making IPTC what it is today.

Best regards, and see you in Toronto in October if not before!

Brendan.

Note from Michael

It was a great experience to help Brendan diving into the IPTC universe with all its members and workstreams plus many contacts in the media industry. I wish you, Brendan, all the best for a great future at this organisation.

Dear all who showed interest in IPTC, it was a pleasure getting in touch with you and I hope I was able to respond in a way helping you to solve problems.

I was invited to continue as Lead of the Photo Metadata and Video Metadata Working Groups and I’m happy to take on responsibility for these workstreams. If you want to contact me from now on please use my own email address mwsteidl@newsit.biz

Best,

Michael