The IPTC has worked together with the DPP and stakeholders from Reuters, Arqiva and Warner Brothers Discovery to develop a pioneering new initiative called DPP Live Production Exchange (LPX). The LPX protocol covers API and a data schema for information related to news coverage of live events, including the ability for B2B event subscribers to be informed about upcoming news events and their coverage.

IPTC’s contribution to the project was to enhance and evolve our ninjs (News in JSON) standard to support news coverage of events and  live streamed content. The News in JSON Working Group dedicated a lot of its time to this work over the past two years, including participating in the DPP LPX Hackathon in Spring 2024.

The underlying data model for the events and planning work in ninjs comes from the IPTC News Architecture and is based on EventsML-G2, a part of the NewsML-G2 family of standards which was created over 10 years ago.

Ian Young of PA Media, Lead of the IPTC News in JSON Working Group, said “Basing the work of ninjs 3.0 on the stable foundation of the IPTC News Architecture made our work much simpler. IPTC members have been syndicating news events for years using this model so we know that it works. That meant that we could focus on making ninjs 3.0 handle live events and streaming video in a way that is practical and simple, both for developers and for users.” 

IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn said “we owe our thanks to our teammates and partners on this project: David Thompson from IPTC liaison partners the DPP, JJ Eynon from CNN / Warner Brothers Discovery, Tania Vivero and Ian McLaren from Reuters (IPTC Voting Member), and Daniel Lynch from Arqiva (IPTC Associate Member). Through a very friendly and collegial but also productive and results-driven collaboration, we have arrived at a solution that should make syndicated news events much easier to handle in all newsroom workflows.”

ninjs 3.0 and the LPX API are or will soon be supported by tools from Arqiva, Reuters and Wolftech (who were recently acquired by Avid). We hope that many more implementations will be emerge in the coming months.

For more on ninjs 3.0, see the following resources:

• IPTC’s pages on ninjs (News in JSON)
• The ninjs generator tool, a simple form that generates sample ninjs documents in versions 1.5, 2.1 and 3.0
• The IPTC’s ninjs GitHub repository
• IPTC members regularly discuss ninjs at our News in JSON Working Group meetings and on the members-only News in JSON WG discussion group.
• Non-members are welcome to discuss ninjs at the public ninjs discussion group.