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This document is for all those interested in promoting efficient exchange and re-use of multi-media news content within their own organisations and with information partners, using open standards and technologies.
Whilst a good deal of the content of this document is aimed at technical architects and software writers, business influencers and decision-makers are encouraged to read the Executive Summary, which gives a broadly non-technical justification for the use of IPTC Standards, and how they may be applied to solve the real-world issues of all organisations that create or consume news.
The Guidelines are intended to provide implementers of the NewsML-G2 Standards with a thorough knowledge of the XML data structures used to manage and describe content, and an appreciation of the issues involved in implementing the standards in their organisation, whether they are a content provider, content customer, or software vendor.
Copyright © 2025 IPTC, the International Press Telecommunications Council. All Rights Reserved.
The Guidelines are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license - see the full license agreement at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. By obtaining, using and/or copying this document, you (the licensee) agree that you have read, understood, and will comply with the terms and conditions of the license.
This document uses materials that are either in the public domain or are made available by permission of their respective copyright holders. Permission of the copyright holder must be obtained prior to the use of protected material. All materials of this IPTC standard covered by copyright shall be licensable at no charge.
If you do not agree to the Terms of Use you must cease all use of the NewsML-G2 specifications and materials now. If you have any questions about the terms, please contact the Managing Director of the International Press Telecommunication Council. (Contact Details below)
While every care has been taken in creating this document, it is not warranted to be error-free, and is subject to change without notice. Check for the latest version and applicable NewsML-G2 Standards and Documentation by visiting www.newsml-g2.org/doc. The versions of the NewsML-G2 Standards covered by this document are listed in About the NewsML-G2 Standards.
IPTC member delegates past and present who have contributed to this documentation project:
BABY, Vincent |
Thomson Reuters* |
BEYNET, Yannick |
Agence France-Presse |
CARD, Tony |
BBC Monitoring* |
COMPTON, Dave |
Refinitiv, an LSEG business |
CRAIG-BENNETT, Honor |
Press Association* |
EVAIN, Jean-Pierre |
European Broadcasting Union* |
EVANS, John |
Transtel Communications Ltd |
GEBHARD, Andreas |
Getty Images* |
GORTAN, Philipp |
APA (Austrian News Agency)* |
GULIJA, Darko |
HINA (Croatia News Agency)* |
HARMAN, Paul |
Press Association (-2014), Bloomberg (2015-) |
HOLLAND, Kelvin |
Point House Media Ltd. |
HUSO, Trond |
NTB (Norwegian News Agency)* |
KELLY, Paul |
XML Team (-2016), Independent (2016-) |
LE MEUR, Laurent |
Agence France-Presse* |
LINDGREN, Johan |
TT Nyhetsbyrån (Swedish News Agency) |
LORENZEN, Jayson |
Business Wire |
MOUGIN, Philippe |
Agence France-Presse |
MYLES, Stuart |
Associated Press* |
QUINN, Brendan |
IPTC |
RATHJE, Kalle |
Deutsche Presse Agentur* |
SCHMIDT-NIA, Robert |
Deutsche Presse Agentur* |
SERGENT, Benoît |
European Broadcasting Union* |
STEIDL, Michael |
IPTC* |
WHESTON, Siobhán |
BBC Monitoring* |
WOLF, Misha |
Thomson Reuters* |
* Delegate is no longer with the member company.
This edition of the NewsML-G2 Implementation Guidelines covers NewsML-G2 v2.35.
Guidelines author: Kelvin Holland, Point House Media Ltd.
Code examples are shown as follows:
<element attribute="attribute_value">Data</element>In NewsML-G2, all XML elements that consist of two (or more) concatenated words are in lowerCamel case. For example:
<catalog>
<catalogRef>Where a word is normally capitalized, it remains so. Thus:
<inlineXML>Attribute names are always all lowercase For example
standardversion="2.35"In these Guidelines, an "Item" with capitalised "I" indicates a NewsML-G2 Item (for example News Item, Planning Item, and so on).
| Admonitions indicate especially important notes or warnings to implementers |
All scheme QCodes used in examples in this document that start with ex- are example schemes used for illustrative purposes. All other schemes relate to IPTC defined vocabularies, known as NewsCodes. These are defined in the official IPTC catalog at https://iptc.org/std/catalog/ . The values of each IPTC scheme can be viewed at http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/ .
The IPTC convention for documents in English is to use UK English spelling, In general, U.S. English is used for property names and values used in IPTC XML Standards (for example, canceled, color, catalog).
A common sense approach dictates that there may be exceptions to this convention.
There are few mandatory features in NewsML-G2. This document uses the terms MUST (NOT), SHOULD (NOT) and MAY as defined in RFC 2119. A MUST instruction in this document refers to mandatory actions; SHOULD refers to recommended actions or best practice to be used unless there is a very good reason not to do so; MAY refers to optional actions.
The XML Specification for time-based properties is based on ISO 8601 and permits the omission of time zone/time offset information. However, these values MUST be present in NewsML-G2 timestamps that express a date AND time, such Item Metadata timestamps, because the exchange of news information may cross time zones, and timing information must be unambiguous. The following examples comply:
<versionCreated>2025-11-06T12:12:12+01:00</versionCreated> (1)
<versionCreated>2025-11-06T12:12:12-01:00</versionCreated> (2)
<versionCreated>2025-11-06T12:12:12Z</versionCreated> (3)| 1 | +ve offset |
| 2 | -ve offest |
| 3 | indicates UTC |
The following example does NOT comply:
<versionCreated>2025-11-06T12:12:12</versionCreated> <!-- invalid: no timezone offset -->Administrative content metadata properties such as <contentCreated> and descriptive date-time properties such as <founded> and <dissolved> use a Truncated DateTime data type permitting parts of the data-time to be truncated from the right, for example:
<founded>2025-11-06</founded> <!-- valid TruncatedDateTime -->complies, but this does not:
<founded>2025-11-06T12:00:00</founded> <!-- not a valid TruncatedDateTime: no timezone offset -->The NewsML-G2 examples used in this document and in the accompanying
files illustrate the use of QCodes and Controlled Vocabularies. Although
the examples include IPTC NewsCodes and Scheme Aliases as defined in a
Catalog, some other QCodes are for example only and not controlled by
the IPTC. In each of the Listings in the document, it will be made clear
which are NOT values from the IPTC NewsCodes vocabularies. All example
vocabularies use scheme aliases starting with the characters ex-.
The IPTC makes NewsML-G2 resources, including XML Schema files, IPTC Catalog and controlled vocabularies, available on its public web servers on an "as is" basis; 24/7 availability of these resources is not guaranteed.
Implementers who wish to reference IPTC-hosted resources in their NewsML-G2 documents should consider the following:
Introducing dependencies on an external resource into the processing of news will break the process if that resource is temporarily unavailable
Processing performance will be throttled by the response from the IPTC server if it is overwhelmed with requests.
The IPTC may reject requests that appear to be an abuse of its service.
The following IPTC resources referenced in NewsML-G2 documents must be retrieved and cached by the implementer according to the following guidance:
The NewsML-G2 XML Schema files and the IPTC Catalog (catalog.IPTC-G2-Standards_nn.xml) can be cached indefinitely as the content of any version will never change.
Controlled Vocabularies (IPTC NewsCodes) referenced as Scheme URIs in the IPTC Catalog may be retrieved and cached daily; their contents are subject to change as IPTC Schemes are updated and this happens not more frequently than daily.
The IPTC also recommends that NewsML-G2 consuming systems should gracefully handle the case where an IPTC-hosted resource is temporarily unavailable.
For further information, please see the NewsML-G2 Specification section on processing remote catalogs. See also the NewsML-G2 Basics chapter and the section on Processing Catalogs and CVs within these guidelines.