IPTC 7901

IPTC 7901 is a news service text markup specification published by the International Press Telecommunications Council that was designed to standardize the content and structure of text news articles. It was formally approved in 1979, and is still the world’s most common way of transmitting news articles to newspapers, web sites and broadcasters from news services.

Using fixed metadata fields and a series of control and other special characters, IPTC 7901 was designed to feed text stories to both teleprinters and computer-based news editing systems. Stories can be assigned to broad categories (such as sports or culture) and be given a higher or lower priority based upon importance.

Although superseded in the early 1990s by IPTC Information Interchange Model and later by the XML-based News Industry Text Format, 7901's huge existing user base has persisted.

IPTC 7901 is closely related to ANPA-1312 (also known as ANPA 84-2 and later 89-3) of the Newspaper Association of America.

External links

International Press Telecommunications Council

The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), based in London, United Kingdom, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, other news providers and news industry vendors and acts as the global standards body of the news media.

Currently more than 50 companies and organizations from the news industry are members of the IPTC, including global players like Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa), BBC, Getty Images, Press Association (PA), Reuters and The New York Times.

IPTC aims at simplifying the distribution of information. To achieve this technical standards are developed to improve the management and exchange of information between content providers, intermediaries and consumers. IPTC is committed to open standards and makes all standards freely available to its members and the wider community.

The IPTC was established in 1965 by a group of news organisations including the Alliance Européenne des Agences de Presse (EANA), American Newspaper Publishers Association (then ANPA, now NAA), Fédération Internationale des Editeurs de Journaux (now WAN-IFRA) and the North American News Agencies (a joint committee of Associated Press, Canadian Press and United Press International) to safeguard the telecommunications interests of the world's press.

IPTC Information Interchange Model

The Information Interchange Model (IIM) is a file structure and set of metadata attributes that can be applied to text, images and other media types. It was developed in the early 1990s by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) to expedite the international exchange of news among newspapers and news agencies.

The full IIM specification includes a complex data structure and a set of metadata definitions.

Although IIM was intended for use with all types of news items — including simple text articles — a subset found broad worldwide acceptance as the standard embedded metadata used by news and commercial photographers. Information such as the name of the photographer, copyright information and the caption or other description can be embedded either manually or automatically.

IIM metadata embedded in images are often referred to as "IPTC headers", and can be easily encoded and decoded by most popular photo editing software.

The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) has largely superseded IIM's file structure, but the IIM image attributes are defined in the IPTC Core schema for XMP and most image manipulation programs keep the XMP and non-XMP IPTC attributes synchronized.