The IPTC NewsCodes Working Group is pleased to announce the latest release of the IPTC NewsCodes, our set of controlled vocabularies for the news industry.

Updates this time span many vocabularies, with the biggest updates to Media Topic and Digital Source Type.

Media Topic updates

Most of the recent work has been in the politics branch.

3 new concepts: by-election, recall election, coalition building

2 retired concepts: political campaigns, church elections

4 modified concept names (in English): voting system, referendum, fundamental rights, football (yes we finally refer to the sport as “football” in en-GB and “soccer” in en-US!)

Modified concept definitions: 22 civil rights, election, voting system, intergovernmental elections, local elections, primary elections, referendum, regional elections, voting, fundamental rights, censorship and freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, human rights, football, political debates, privacy, women’s rights, breaking (breakdance)

1 hierarchy move: fundamental rights has been moved from politics to society.

Also, the Wikidata mapping URIs have all been changed to point to the http:// version of the URI instead of the https:// version. This follows the official Wikidata guidance.

See the official Media Topic vocabulary on the IPTC Controlled Vocabulary server, and an easier-to-navigate tree view. An Excel version of IPTC Media Topics is also available.

Digital Source Type updates

5 new concepts have been added:

• Multi-frame computational capture sampled from real life, intended to cover media recorded by modern cameras and smartphones that may process several captured images together to create the saved media file, without any interaction with the photographer. 
• Human-edited media, intended to replace the retired Original media with minor human edits, given that it is subjective to decide what is a “minor” edit.
• Digital creation, intended to replace the retired Digital art so that we can avoid the existential question of “what is art?”
• Screen capture, covering screenshots and screen recordings made on a device
• Composite of elements, as a generic form of the more specific “composite” terms.

2 concepts have been retired: Original media with minor human edits, and Digital art, as explained above.

8 concepts have had their names and definitions modified, while retaining the same machine-readable ID for backwards-compatibility purposes:

• Digital capture sampled from real life (ID: digitalCapture), replacing the previous name “Original digital capture sampled from real life”
• Digitised from a transparent negative (ID: negativeFilm), replacing the previous name “Digitised from a negative on film”
• Digitised from a transparent positive (ID: positiveFilm), replacing the previous name “Digitised from a positive on film”
• Digitised from a non-transparent medium (ID: print), replacing the previous name “Digitised from a print on non-transparent medium”
• Edited using Generative AI (ID: compositeWithTrainedAlgorithmicMedia), replacing the previous name “Composite with Trained algorithmic media”
• Algorithmically-altered media (ID: algorithmicallyEnhanced), replacing the previous name “Algorithmically Enhanced”
• Created using Generative AI (ID: trainedAlgorithmicMedia), replacing the previous name “Trained Algorithmic Media”
• Virtual event recording (ID: virtualRecording), replacing the previous name “Virtual recording”

Our thanks go to IPTC representatives and experts from Partnership on AI, Google, Adobe, C2PA, CIPA and many others on making these updates to our vocabulary, which is now widely used to identify Generative AI content.

Updates to other NewsCodes vocabularies

Alternative  Identifier Role (altidrole)

• Vocabulary’s name changed to fix a spelling mistake.
• New concept: IPTC Video Metadata Hub ID (altidrole:vmhVideoId)

Event Occur Status (eocstat)

• Fix spelling mistake “occurence” -> “occurrence” throughout.

Golf Shot (spgolshot)

• New concept: Chip (spgolshot:chip)

Rights Property (rightsprop)

• New concept: Copyright Year (rightsprop:copyrightyear)
• 4 modified definitions: Minor Model Age Disclosure, Model Release Id, Model Release Status, Property Release Status.

Sports Concept (spct)

• New concept: Recurring Competition (spct:recurring-competition)
• New concept: Governing Body (spct:governing-body)