At our three-day summer meeting in Stockholm, 13-15 June 2016, about 30 IPTC member delegates and 10 invited experts networked and discussed emerging issues and challenges affecting technology and the news industry.

Thanks to the several news agencies and vendors who gave examples of IPTC standards as the backbone of their news exchange systems and products:

Mittmedia about its use of APIs, automated creation of text news by text robots, and data-driven journalism; Profium on the use of multicast; VG on integrating newsrooms with product and technology; Infomaker on its Newspilot publishing platform; Swedish news agency TT on their Toolbox and development of digital content, strategies, and new business; Sourcefabric on its Superdesk publishing platform; Journalism++ on robots – when, where why to start; Fotoware on its digital asset management software FotoWeb. Special thanks to Johan Lindgren and TT for helping us navigate Stockholm, as well as coordinate these presentations.

We approved SportsML 3.0, a major upgrade of the premier open standard for sports data, and NewsML-G2 version 2.23 to further refine the most widely-used standard for representing news and events across all media types.

We also talked about ideas for marketing the IPTC and ways to grow our membership. We will increase our discussion of relevant news and events, as well as information about how the IPTC’s work is applied by news companies every day. We plan to produce more hands-on information about photo metadata as, judging from the traffic to our website, that’s something a lot of people are looking for.

A new and exciting way to get involved with the IPTC is EXTRA: The EXTraction Rules Apparatus. We received a grant from Google’s Digital News Initiative to build and freely distribute a multilingual open-source platform for rules-based classification of news content. If that sounds interesting, then get in touch to learn more.

Please consider joining us for our Autumn Meeting in Berlin (24 – 26 October 2016), which will feature a video workshop day, on 25 October. We plan to launch the Video Metadata Hub recommendation, a single set of video metadata properties covering the entire video workflow, including mappings and guidelines for many existing video standards.

If you have any questions about the IPTC or our Berlin meeting, please contact me at chair@iptc.org. I will be happy to discuss the benefits of becoming involved in IPTC or attending our meetings.

Regards,

Stuart Myles
Chairman, IPTC / Director of Information Management, Associated Press
_{Stockholm photo: Jill Laurinaitis}

Extensis, a leading developer of software and services for creative professionals and workgroups, joins IPTC to extend the company’s commitment to advancing standards designed to making working with metadata easier.

“Extensis as system vendor has taken the essential role of enabling companies managing photos to make efficient use of IPTC’s widely used photo metadata standard”, said Michael Steidl, IPTC managing director and lead of the photo metadata work. “IPTC welcomes Extensis as new member of our organization; we will work jointly on improving professional photo workflows”, he added.

Read the Extensis press release.

See the list of current IPTC members and find more about joining our organisation.

Welcome to our newly launched website! After a few months of development and content evaluation we can proudly present a faster, lightweight, more business focused, and most importantly: mobile-ready website.

The IPTC is a volunteer-driven membership organization and it’s important that we are easily approachable — both literally and figuratively. Over the last few years, many of you have told us that you found it too difficult to locate information about the IPTC, our standards or even how to get in touch with us. So we fixed all that.

Focus on business value.

We have the full roster of IPTC standards explained, in brief and with a clear focus on the business value of each standard. Rapid innovation and agile product development cycles at web scale are practically impossible without the underpinning of solid technical standards — the IPTC delivers those, for a variety of use cases in today’s publishing and media environment. 

In short, our new website is aimed at those of you who are looking for those IPTC standards, for general information about the organization and for the benefits of being a member. (We maintain a separate website for developers with in-depth technical information.)

We’d also like to say thanks to Kevin and Jonathan, our design and development team at Iron to Iron; they really did a great job and are a pleasure to collaborate with.

Have a look around, let us know if something looks wrong or if you’re missing anything. And do consider joining us — we’d love to have you on board.

Andreas Gebhard
(Lead of the website project team)