IPTC Autumn Meeting 2026: smarter stories, verifiable sources and two new working groups

[Brendan Quinn]

Jon Roberts, CTO of ITN, and Brian Hopman of Associated Press presented the Story Object Model project at the IPTC Autumn Meeting 2026.
What if a newsroom system understood the story it was reporting? Could a quote be traced back to its source, with cryptographic proof? And how can publishers see what AI agents do with their journalism? More than 60 media-technology experts from IPTC member organisations gathered this week to work through these questions and others. We ended the meeting with three new standard versions, two new working groups and updated rules for verifying news publishers.

Three ideas worth watching​

Provenance for claims, not just pictures. Jenny Romano presented the Provenance Bridge project, a collaboration with Starling Lab at Stanford University and BBC Research & Development. It identifies the sources behind reported claims and signs them digitally, so that anyone can later check where a claim came from and see if it has been changed.

Stories that know what they are. Jon Roberts, ITN’s chief technology officer, and Brian Hopman, senior director of workflow technology at Associated Press, presented the Story Object Model. It grew out of the Smart Stories incubator project at this year’s IBC conference. It looks at the idea of the ecosystem of newsroom software tools communicating with each other via a central “story bus” that understands what should happen in the newsroom and beyond as a story develops.

Watching the machines read. Alex Springer of the SPUR Coalition set out the group’s ideas for “content telemetry”. The aim is to show publishers how AI models and agents consume and process their content.

This week, 60+ media tech experts from across IPTC member organisations got together to discuss what happens when newsroom systems understand the story that is being reported, how information about journalistic sources can be tied to cryptographic provenance, and to agree on creation of two new working groups.

New standards​

Members of the IPTC Standards Committee voted through three new standard versions:

• NewsML-G2 v2.36 adds new properties for AI generation information, aligning with the Photo Metadata changes from 2025.
• ninjs 3.3, 2.4 and 1.8 add an extension point for extra metadata about renditions, plus a “contentDigitised” property that records when a digital asset was scanned.
• Photo Metadata Standard 2026.1 adds a Publisher structure, developed with PLUS. It also adds non-contiguous image regions (a tricky proposal to get right, so we thank Geert Verhoeven of the University of Vienna for his collaboration on this feature). Finally, a new “Image Quality” structure that records how assets were digitised. This will be useful everywhere, but especially in the cultural heritage sector.

Two new working groups​

At the Standards Committee meeting, members also voted to create two new Working Groups, each of which will build on an existing initiative:

• The Publisher Transparency Working Group, led by Scott Yates, will carry on the work started by the trust.txt project from JournalList.
• The Atomic News Working Group, led by Paul Kelly, will develop the News Atoms project started by Sannuta Raghu.

Both groups aim to produce new IPTC standards, which will be agreed and published at future meetings.

Media provenance​

The Media Provenance Committee heard from its three working groups about a busy few months. Highlights included our new book, “Media Provenance for News Publishers”, our Content Credentials Signing Service, a paper on media-provenance workflows presented at IBC in Amsterdam, and progress on phase two of the Verified News Publisher List governance policies.

The committee voted through two policy changes. D-Trust becomes a supported Certificate Authority for Verified News Publisher certificates. And publishers with their own conformant claim-signing tools can now register them on a supplementary list and qualify as Verified News Publishers.

Annual General Meeting​

At the AGM, the IPTC’s voting members elected a new board and voted on the organisation’s finances and its plans for 2027.

We will share more on each of these developments in the coming weeks and months. Our thanks go to all the presenters and attendees who gave their time and ideas to make the meeting a success.

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