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