This week, 60+ media tech experts from across IPTC member organisations got together to discuss what happens when newsroom systems understand the story that is being reported, how information about journalistic sources can be tied to cryptographic provenance, and to agree on creation of two new working groups.

This year’s IPTC Autumn Meeting saw presentations from Jenny Romano about the Provenance Bridge project, conducted with Starling Lab at Stanford University and BBC Research & Development, an effort to identify the sources of reported claims and digitally sign them so that provenance can be tracked for reference purposes; ITN’s Chief Technology Officer Jon Roberts and Associated Press’s Senior Director of Workflow Technology Brian Hopman presented the Story Object Model, created via the Smart Stories accelerator at this year’s IBC conference; and Alex Springer from the SPUR Coalition presented their group’s ideas around “content telemetry” allowing publishers to understand how AI models and agents consume and process their content.

In addition, we heard updates from all of our committees and working groups. Three new standard versions were voted through by members at the IPTC Standards Committee meeting:

• NewsML-G2 v2.36 will add new properties for AI generation information, aligning with the Photo Metadata changes from 2025;
• ninjs 3.3, 2.4 and 1.8 will add an extension point for additional metadata about renditions, and also adds a “contentDigitised” property to record when a digital asset was scanned;
• Photo Metadata Standard 2026.1 will add a Publisher structure (in association with PLUS), non-contiguous image regions (a proposal that was tricky to get right – we thank Geert Verhoeven of the University of Vienna for his collaboration on this feature) and a new structure for “Image Quality” that records technical information about the processes used to digitise assets, in all contexts but especially in the cultural heritage sector.

The Standards Committee also voted to create two new Working Groups: the Publisher Transparency Working Group, led by Scott Yates, and the Atomic News Working Group, led by Paul Kelly.

The Publisher Transparency Working Group will carry on the work started by the trust.txt project from JournalList.

The Atomic News group will further the work started by Sannuta Raghu with her News Atoms project.

Both of these new Working Groups will work towards creating new IPTC standards to be agreed and published at future meetings.

At the Media Provenance Committee meeting, we heard reports from our three Working Groups on their recent work, including our new book “Media Provenance for News Publishers”, our Content Credentials Signing Service, the paper on media provenance workflows presented at IBC in Amsterdam, and our work towards phase two of the Verified News Publisher List governance policies. The Committee voted through two changes to the policies, to enable D-Trust as a new Certificate Authority and to allow publishers with their own conformant claim-signing tools to register them on a supplementary list and qualify as Verified News Publishers.

More information on each of these new developments will be shared in the coming weeks and months.