The IPTC Standards Committee is happy to announce that ninjs, IPTC’s schema for marking up news content in JSON, has been revised to versions 2.1 and 1.5.

The vote to approve the new versions was taken at the recent IPTC Spring Meeting in Tallinn, Estonia and online.

This is in keeping with IPTC’s decision to maintain two parallel versions of ninjs: one for those who can’t upgrade to the 2.x version of backwards compatibility reasons, and those who prefer the simpler structure of ninjs 2.x that is easier to handle in some tools.

The ninjs User Guide has been updated to reflect the changes, which are summarised below.

ContactInfo added to ninjs 1.5 and 2.1

ninjs 2.1 and ninjs 1.5 both include the new contactinfo structure which can be used in the people, organisations, places and infosources properties (and their ninjs 1.x equivalents person, organisation, place and infosource).

The contactInfo structure can contain physical or online contact information such as a street address or postal address, a username on social media such as Twitter, Instagram or TikTok, or even a locator such as what3words.

Here are some examples of how the contactinfo property can be used:

"people": [
  {
    "name": "Jonas Svensson",
    "contactinfo": [
      {
        "type":"phone",
        "role": "work",
        "value": "+46 (0)8-7887500"
      }
    ]
  }
],

"organisations": [
  {
    "name": "International Committee of the Red Cross",
    "contactinfo": [
      {
        "type": "web",
        "value": "https://www.icrc.org/"
      },
      {
        "type": "address",
        "address": {
          "lines": [
            "19 Avenue de la paix",
            "1202 Geneva",
            "Switzerland"
          ]
        }
      },
      {
        "type": "telephone",
        "value": "+41 22 734 60 01"
      }
    ]
  }
]

Better support for organisation identifiers such as tickers, ISIN etc

ninjs 2.1 and 1.5 also include the new symboltype and symbol properties under symbols. Symbol can identify any type of URI describing the type of the symbol. The CV http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/financialinstrumentsymboltype is recommended.

The ticker sub-property under symbols is now deprecated. This means that it can still be used if necessary, but use is not recommended.

We now recommend that ticker symbols are stored using symbol="TCKR" and symboltype="https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/financialinstrumentsymboltype/Ticker".

Better support for machine classification

The subjects (ninjs 2.x) / subject (ninjs 1.x) properties now allow for the sub-properties creator, relevance and confidence. 

This allows organisations to more accurately use machine-generated subject tags in their content.  while stating that it was created by a machine (using the creator property), and giving numerical values for the relevance and confidence scores that are reported by machine tagging engines. (Of course, these properties can also be used for human-created subject tags if necessary!)

In addition, some internal changes to the schema were made to fix a validation bug that existed in previous versions. In order to accommodate these changes, the ninjs 2.1 schema uses the https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema version of JSON Schema.

Thanks to Johan Lindgren, welcome Ian Young as Working Group Lead

At the Spring Meeting in Tallinn we said farewell to Johan Lindgren as Lead of the News in JSON Working Group.

Johan, of the TT news agency in Sweden, was instrumental in bringing the News in JSON Working Group back from its quiet period after the initial launch of ninjs. This directly led to the release of several new versions of ninjs over the past few years, and its adoption by many of the world’s top news providers.

The IPTC wishes to thank Johan for all his contributions, and wishes him well for his retirement.

Johan’s work will be taken over by Ian Young from PA Media Group / Alamy based in the UK. Ian steps up to the Lead role after participating in the Working Group for many years, since the earliest days of ninjs.

We thank Ian for being willing to take on the lead role, and we look forward to seeing what developments will emerge from the News in JSON Working Group in the future.