IPTC 7901 is a news service text markup specification published by the
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.
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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
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
fields and a series of control and other special characters, IPTC 7901 was designed to feed text stories to both
teleprinter
A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Initia ...
s 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Although superseded in the early 1990s by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
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 ...
and later by the XML-based
News Industry Text Format News Industry Text Format (NITF) is an XML specification designed to standardize the content and structure of individual text news articles.
Usage
The NITF specification defines a standard way to mark up an article's content and structure, as wel ...
, 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