Rights, Classification and Search Relevance for News - A Short Wrap Up of the IPTC Toronto Meeting

Last week, the IPTC held its Autumn meeting, a chance for people from around the world who have a common interest in news and media technology to discuss standards and learn from each other.

We had an entire day dedicated to news search, classification and descriptive metadata. AP's own Chad Schorr discussed our use of Elastic for robust indexing of content, Veronika Zielinska discussed AP's rules-based automated news classification system, and I reviewed our new automated tagging for images. We also heard from our peers at Bloomberg, New York Times, DPA and NTB on their systems. Finally, we had the opportunity to hear directly from Elastic on their suggestions for the best way to use their tools for news and media content.

A fairly momentous event for IPTC this year was Google Image's agreement to display image credit metadata for photos. This follows many years of discussions between IPTC, CEPIC and many others with the search giant. These talks came to a head during the CEPIC Congress / IPTC Photo Metadata Conference in Berlin in May 2018 and I'm very glad to see that concrete changes to Google Images use of metadata followed swiftly after. During the discussion of IPTC's Rights work for the news and media industry, we discussed ways to build on this progress - centred on driving adoption of the RightsML standard for machine processable expressions of rights and restrictions. We also discussed ways that IPTC could cooperate with other organizations, such as Europeana, to drive adoption of rights metadata.

As with other IPTC face-to-face meetings, there were many other interesting presentations and discussions, including the latest developments in video metadata, sports data and hearing from Civil on their plans for blockchain-backed journalism. For a more complete overview, checkout IPTC's posts on Day 1 and Day 2. And consider joining IPTC's next face-to-face meetings in Lisbon and Paris.

The View from Toronto - IPTC Chairman's Report 2018

I Chair the Board of Directors of IPTC, a consortium of news agencies, publishers and system vendors, which develops and maintains technical standards for news, including NewsML-G2, rNews and News-in-JSON. I work with the Board to broaden adoption of IPTC standards, to maximize information sharing between members and to organize successful face-to-face meetings.

We hold face-to-face meetings in several locations throughout the year, although, most of the detailed work of the IPTC is now conducted via teleconferences and email discussions. Our Annual General Meeting for 2018 was held in Toronto in October. As well as being the time for formal votes and elections, the AGM is a chance for the IPTC to look back over the last year and to look ahead about what is in store. What follows are a slightly edited version of my remarks at the Toronto Annual General Meeting.

IPTC has had a good year – the 53rd year for the organization!

We've updated key standards, including NewsML-G2, the Video Metadata Hub and the Media Topics, as well as launching RightsML 2.0, a significant upgrade in the way to express machine processable rights for news and media.

Of course, IPTC standards are a means, not an end. The value of the standards is the easier exchange, consumption and handling of news and media by organizations large and small around the world. So it is important that we continue to focus on making our standards straightforward to use and have them adopted as widely as possible. I think we are making progress on the usability front, such as moving away from zip'd PDFs towards actual HTML web pages for documentation of NewsML-G2. Over the last year, we've continued to work with other organizations - W3C, Europeana and MINDS - to develop standards, increase adoption - and, perhaps most importantly, to open up IPTC to other perspectives. And we have had a huge win in the recognition of key photo metadata by Google Images. But we clearly need to do more for both usability and adoption. During the course of this meeting, we've had some good discussion about what more we can do in both areas and I encourage all members to help spread the word about IPTC standards, and suggest ways we can accelerate adoption.

Of course, the nature of news and media continues to evolve. On the one hand, new forms of story telling are emerging, such as Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Equally, using data as the way to power stories continues to increase both data-driven stories and data-supported stories. By data-driven stories, I mean journalists reviewing large databases of information and creating stories based on the trends they find. By data-supported stories, I mean content creators using visually-interesting graphics to support their content. The automated production, curation and consumption of news and media is likely to increase for the foreseeable future, driven by both technological improvements and the seductive economics of replacing people with algorithms. And it is not only economics which are driving these changes and challenges, just as it is no longer fill-in-the-blank text stories being written by robot journalists. Synthetic media - such as "deep fakes" - are able to produce increasingly convincing photo, video and audio stories that are indistinguishable from "real" media. Inevitably, the existence and debunking of these fakes will be used to deny legitimate reporting, with the implications of continued erosion of trust in media. All of these trends - AR, VR, data-powered journalism and dealing with trust, credibility and misinformation - are topics which IPTC has discussed over the last few years, but we have not developed any tracks of work to try to address them. In part, this is because these are, by definition, outside of the areas that our member organizations traditionally deal in and are so quite difficult to tackle in terms of establishing standards.

However, even within the context of standards, IPTC is opening up to new forms of experimentation. As we heard on Monday, the joint project between IPTC and MINDS, to allow for the identification of audience and interest metadata, has lead to the introduction of structures within NewsML-G2 to support rapid prototyping and experimentation. I see this as a positive move, with great potential to accelerate the work we do and to help keep it lightweight and relevant.

Of course, IPTC has had significant changes of its own over the last year. We bid goodbye to Michael Steidl as our Managing Director of 15 years, and welcomed Brendan Quinn as our new Managing Director this summer. We're grateful that we continue to benefit from Michael's skills and experience, as he has remained the Chairman of the Photo and Video Working Group. And I think that Brendan has made a great start in his new role in helping us keep the IPTC moving forward.

As part of the handover from Michael to Brendan, we decided to scan a lot of the old paper documents, including various types of IPTC newsletter, dating back to 1967, two years after the organization was founded. I thought I would look back to what IPTC was up to in the year 2000, the year I became a delegate to the IPTC, back when I worked for Dow Jones.

And there I am in the photo at the top of the page. Or, at least, the back of my head. Some things are quite reminiscent of this week's meeting - the birth of NewsML, a focus on improved communications, cooperation with other organizations e.g. MPEG-7.

Then I thought I would look back on IPTC in 1968, the year I was born. Some things were similar to today - such as a focus on fine technical details such as Alphabet Number 5 and a plan to go to Lisbon next year for a meeting. However, most of the focus in those days was mainly on lobbying against tariffs and satellite monopolies.

So I think it is fair to say that the IPTC has never been just a standards body. It is also, more broadly, a community of practice. We are a group of people from around the world who have a common interest in news and media technology. The process of sharing information and experiences with the group, through these face to face meetings and the online development of standards, means that the members of IPTC learn from each other, and so have an opportunity to develop professionally and personally. I hope you will agree that yesterday's discussion of news search and classification was an excellent example of exchange of experiences, both good and bad, which can help many of us avoid problems and seize opportunities, and so accelerate our work.

I think it is helpful for us to recognize that IPTC is a community which continues to evolve, as the interests, goals and membership of the organization change.  I’m confident that – working together – we can continue to reshape the IPTC to better meet the needs of the membership and to move us further forward in support of solving the business and editorial needs of the news and media industry. I look forward to working with all of you on addressing the challenges in 2019 and beyond.

News Credibility, Verification and the Madness of Crowds - A Junk News Roundup

As the Associated Press states in our News Values and Principles:

"We have a long-standing role setting the industry standard for ethics in journalism. It is our job — more than ever before — to report the news accurately and honestly."

It is easy to see how AP is taking concrete steps in this area by, for example, our fact checking work (online, on twitter). And the AP Verify project is building a "newsroom tool that will combine artificial intelligence with our editorial expertise to automatically source and verify user-generated content."

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some efforts going on elsewhere in the areas of credibility, verification and identifying junk news.

Standards Efforts

The IEEE is working on P7011 "Standard for the Process of Identifying and Rating the Trustworthiness of News Sources". The IEEE is a formal standards body, responsible for many of the technical standards which underpin the internet.

The Credibility Coalition describes itself as "an interdisciplinary community committed to improving our information ecosystems and media literacy through transparent and collaborative exploration." It is not, in itself, a standards body. If you examine the CredCo "about" page, you will spot my photo - I attended early meetings.

The Credible Web W3C Community Group describes its mission as "to help shift the Web toward more trustworthy content without increasing censorship or social division." There is a significant overlap between members of the Credibility Coalition and the Credible Web Community Group.  Despite the W3C link, this is not a formal standards effort - Community Groups are open to anyone. There are weekly video conferences to define an informal standard.

The Trust Project describes itself as "a consortium of top news companies" and says it "is developing transparency standards that help you easily assess the quality and credibility of journalism." Again, the Trust Project is not a formal standards body (like IEEE, IPTC or W3C).

Verification Projects

At the recent IPTC meeting, we saw presentations about two European projects aimed at helped to identify the spread of misinformation.

Truly Media is a joint project between ATC and Deutsche Welle. It is a "a web-based collaboration platform developed to support primarily journalists and human rights workers in the verification of digital content," and was developed with funds from EU and the DNI.

InVid aims to develop "a knowledge verification platform to detect emerging stories and assess the reliability of newsworthy video files and content spread via social media." It is an EU-funded project. Their demo was quite sophisticated. They also have a browser plugin which lets you verify news video and images yourself.

Wisdom and Madness

Finally, via Fair Warning, I saw "The Wisdom and Madness of Crowds" - a fun explainer in the form of a game. It walks you through why some crowds turn to madness and some to wisdom, with a focus on the spread of misinformation but also good information. It helps give some insight into the different dynamics at play and even some suggestions for how to reduce the spread of junk news and amplify the spread of verified news.

IPTC Names Brendan Quinn as New Managing Director, Celebrates the Service of Michael Steidl

As well as being Director of Information Management at the AP, I'm also Chairman of the Board of the IPTC, the standards body for the international news and media industry. The IPTC sets technology standards used around the world, including photo metadata, video metadataand machine readable rights. We also develop technical approaches to the challenges facing the news media, such as identifying junk news, leveraging automation and coping with the impact of GDPR. Together with the other members of the IPTC - including Reuters, AFP, DPA and the New York Times - I help organize face-to-face meetings and numerous teleconferences so that we can work together and learn about interesting new projects from vendors and academics.

The Managing Director is the sole employee of the IPTC, helping to organize the work, manage the finances and recruit new membership. For the last 15 years, Michael Steidl has held this role. When Michael announced his plan to retire in the summer of 2018, I organized and ran the effort to find and recruit a successor. We talked to many candidates, several of whom were highly qualified. The Board did not take the decision lightly. In the end, we made an offer to Brendan Quinn - and we are thrilled he has accepted. Brendan brings with him a wealth of news technology experience, with organizations from around the world and of all sizes. He even worked at the Associated Press on AP's Video Hub. He has a unique combination of strategic insight into the challenges faced by the news industry and the technical know-how to help guide our work in technical standards and beyond. I look forward to partnering with Brendan in charting the future of the organization and to grow the work and influence of the IPTC.

At the IPTC's Spring Meeting 2018 in Athens, we celebrated Michael's 15 years of service to the IPTC, and welcomed Brendan as the new Managing Director, starting in June 2018.

Celebrating Michael Steidl's 15 Years as IPTC Managing Director

At the IPTC's Spring 2018 Meeting in Athens, we covered many interesting technical news topics - including video metadata, machine-readable rights, news credibility, and the challenges of localization and localisation. We also welcomed our incoming Managing Director, Brendan Quinn, and took some time to celebrate our retiring Managing Director, Michael Steidl.

As Chairman of the IPTC, I was honoured to give a speech, marking Michael's achievements over the last 15 years of service to the organization.

I would like to take a few minutes to celebrate Michael Steidl, our IPTC Managing Director for the past 15 years. Looking back over that time, many things stand out. I think we would all agree that Michael has a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of the IPTC - the standards, the history and - last but not least - the often obscure facets of the rules and regulations. Many times, an enthusiastic IPTC person has suggested some change or new idea, only to be gently reminded, "Well, I remember a discussion in 2008 where we voted on that topic and we decided..." I know that we will all miss Michael's kind but firm insistence that the rules and history of the IPTC be respected. And, in many ways, he acts as the representative of all the member organizations, whether or not they happen to be present in a particular discussion, to ensure that, for example, the large organizations don't dominate at the expense of the smaller organizations.

To give some perspective on Michael's achievements, I thought it would be interesting to look back on what Michael himself said about his role and the work of the IPTC. In December of 2003, the IPTC Spectrum - the old newsletter we used to publish - included Michael's reflections on his first year as Managing Director. I recommend you read the whole thing yourself. But now I'd like to focus on three things he said.

First, Michael described visiting the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam and drew an analogy between the artist's evolving use of colour and his own intention in how he would work within the IPTC. He said "This might be a metaphor for the big task I jumped into: not to reinvent the wheel of running the IPTC office, well developed, maintained, and handed over by David Allen, but to add some extra shades of colour to IPTC’s image as a major player for standards in the news industry." Of course, looking back over the past 15 years of work, it is clear that on the one hand Michael did succeed in taking over the reins from his predecessor. But, on the other hand, he has done a lot more than simply adding some extra shades of colour. In fact, I would say that Michael's contributions to the IPTC is really more equivalent to an entirely new artistic movement - a sort of Renaissance for the organization - including managing the introduction of entirely new ways of operating the IPTC. When Michael started, there were no teleconferences or video conferences or even development of standards through email lists. There was no internet available during the meetings - which has perhaps been a mixed blessing, since people can keep up with the work back home, but we aren't always as focused.

There were already some hints of these changes in Michael's remarks. The second of the three quotes I want to pick out from the 2003 Spectrum:

We want to "discuss new ways of developing and maintaining our standards. These appear quite necessary to me: in the past decades IPTC usually developed and maintained one to two standards in parallel; IPTC 7901 was succeeded by IIM; and this was followed by NITF over a period of almost 15 years. But now three standards - NITF, NewsML, SportsML - have been developed and approved in a time span of about eight years. These three standards are all currently active and an additional three are under development ProgramGuideML, EventsML and an upcoming weather mark up. So soon we will have six active standards." So, three standards were developed in 15 years. Then three more in eight years. So, the IPTC work was already accelerating. But, just as a reminder, at this meeting in Athens, we discussed six different standards and will vote on three major updates. On top of that, we've discussed ten or more additional work areas - including the VideoDextra initiative, the EXTRA project and everyone's favourite topic of GDPR. Some people might think that standards take a long time to develop - and they do! - but we're no longer producing three standards in 15 years. or even only discussing technical standards anymore.

Now, 15 years later, Michael knows every detail of a full range of standards and an impressive array of initiatives. As was mentioned earlier, Michael has developed an extensive records keeping scheme of - I believe it was - 5,000 file folders stuffed with IPTC information. Now, with Brendan Quinn coming on board as our new Managing Director this summer, it must seem like a daunting task to succeed such an accomplished Managing Director.

So, I want to come to the third Spectrum quote from Michael from back in 2003, to reassure Brendan that Michael was once in the same boat. Michael said: "Yes, I had to learn the ropes first. IPTC operations are complex and it’s like conquering an unknown island: region after region had to be explored and all details of operation had to be made transparent, for me and to others. Preparing and providing the required resources for a meeting, taking minutes that reproduce the key points of the discussions, handling the finances, and last but not least supporting and co-ordinating the technical work of IPTC was occasionally really breathtaking and I have to admit it was a steep learning curve." So, Brendan, don't worry it wasn't easy for Michael either, but it can be done!

Finally, I want to close with an entirely different aspect of Michael's time with the IPTC. I've talked a lot about Michael's work. And, of course, solving news technology problems is the main reason for IPTC's existence. However, Michael has always pointed out in his polite, gentle but firm way that there is more to it than that. The IPTC is also an organization made up of people. It is a unique mix of people who often come from rival organizations and quite different backgrounds, who are able to come together and learn from each other and co-operate to solve problems together. And, in that process, it is often the case that rivals can become colleagues and colleagues can become friends. Michael, many of the people here - and many others around the world - count you as a friend. And so, along with your many work achievements with the IPTC, you should be very proud of all the colleagues and friends you have made.

And now, I'd like to ask all of your colleagues and friends here to join me in raising a glass, thanking you and wishing you a very happy retirement. THANK YOU MICHAEL!

Developing the Digital Marketplace for Copyrighted Works Meeting in Washington DC on January 25th

I'm looking forward to the "Developing the Digital Marketplace for Copyrighted Works" meeting in Washington DC on January 25th. This is the latest in a series of meetings organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force. The stated goal is to "facilitate constructive, cross-industry dialogue among stakeholders about ways to promote a more robust and collaborative online marketplace for copyrighted works".

I will be speaking on the "identification" panel ("Capturing Content, People, Permissions"). I attended the previous meeting (see my short summary and watch the videos). If a day of rights discussions sounds like your idea of fun, then this is a free, open-to-the-public meeting (sign up). You can also watch the live stream.