Panel pursues new standard for delivering varied content

NEW ORLEANS -- In a room about as far from the exhibit hall as you could get at NEXPO '97 and still be in the same building, the NAA's News Information Task Force gathered again to further the state of the new standard for wire service delivery.

The committee has been struggling to redefine the code for identifying and routing wire text, which was approved at a meeting in Tokyo about three weeks before the NEXPO meeting. A copy is available on the web site run by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) at http://www.iptc.org/iptc/.

Among the committee's members are representatives from the Newspaper Association of America of Vienna, Va.; wire services, including Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Dow Jones, Reuters and United Press International; newspapers, including the New York Times, Star Tribune of Minneapolis, Chicago Tribune and Miami Herald, and suppliers, including Lexis-Nexis of Dayton, Ohio, and Tecnavia S.A. of Lugano, Switzerland.

Among the promises of the new standard, complementary to IPTC standards, is an expanded set of tags for flagging fields relevant to 'Net-era data -- including video -- moving down the pike and into newsrooms, most of which had barely seen a computer 20 years ago.

Wire services will have to adopt a new wire service header, one that it is hoped will be compatible with standards set by IPTC, the News Information Task Force (NITF) and the Radio and TV News Directors Association (RTNDA).

On the receiving end, newspapers will have to gear up for the new standard as well. Some aspects of the move from the years-old ANPA 1312 standard to NITF -- such as new paragraph structure and encapsulation tags -- should be easy, while others, such as using the content markup enrichments that come with NITF, may be a bigger challenge, possibly requiring new editorial systems in order to take full advantage of the features the standard will make available.

Newspapers can expect notice about test transmissions from their wire services in the near future. Since the new standard will involve a radical change in how text is composed and sent, the wire services anticipate that it will take an "indeterminate" time before full markup capability is achieved, and a bit more before the standard can be fully integrated into real news production.

The committee's unresolved issues include production requirements, transmission and reception of tabular materials, legal and copyright issues, and the provision of hooks in NITF in order to drive a Braille pin pad.

In addition, technical minutiae abound -- for example, whether to move to Base 64 or sub-byte coding in order to get more octets to represent the greater number of characters they seek. They also hope to create a naming structure for identification of an information source which is consistent with the Digital Newsphoto Parameter Record header.

In writing the new standard, the committee is struggling to take into account the range of diversity within the global media village. Photos may have multiple captions to reflect different cultural perspectives of events, and text is likely to be transmitted in character sets that include many more characters -- like Cyrillic, for instance -- than our own familiar Latin alphabet.

Unsurprisingly, it is the cultural aspect of the new standard that appears to be the most contentious among committee members. The long established category codes, while they have been satisfying the needs of U.S. newspapers, don't necessarily work as well on the Continent -- or for the whippersnapper new media news entrepreneurs who are developing their own category schemes.

For example, some cultures are unyielding in their belief that chess is a sport. Similarly, is stuff about television appropriately dumped into the business or the entertainment category? Do epidemics fall into the health or disaster category?

Depending on your cultural perspective, these words -- war, protest, unrest, student, labor, political -- can all be describing the same thing. Such semantic philosophy can make it darned hard to find a story on the wire, and to figure out where to archive it.

In an administrative move, after "six or seven" years of presiding as chair of the committee, Judith Wilner of the New York Times passed her gavel to Bruce Adomeit of the Star Tribune.

Considering the issues the committee faces at meetings scheduled into January across the globe (Portland, Ore.; Amsterdam; Miami), it's no surprise that Wilner was smiling as she left the meeting room.

-- LCC

From THE COLE PAPERS, August 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.