The IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) calls itself the global standards body for news media. In this article we focus on one of its standards: Media Topics. This standard contains a subject taxonomy for media, which is a topic hierarchy that can be used to classify news articles.
*Example of a subset of Media Topics
Why you should use IPTC Media Topics
Many media houses categorize their content using their own in-house categories. Are these categories the same across all their newsrooms? Are these categories understandable to the audience? Are they useful for internal purposes, such as performance analyses, organizing content, or performing advanced searches? At Geneea, we believe that a good content taxonomy can meet all of these needs and that it would be a shame not to use the one that was created specifically for this use case: IPTC Media Topics.
There are several advantages to using this particular taxonomy. The main one is that it was created specifically for the news industry, so it’s very unlikely that any content created by a newsroom will not fit into one of the categories. The other one is that this taxonomy is continually being updated (see “Updates” below), so that it is always being adapted to our ever-changing world. Next, the taxonomy is very broad. It currently contains over 1,200 topics, so that it should cover all your areas of interest.
Of course, there are other taxonomies as well, some of which have also been tailored for the news industry. We don’t want to discourage you from using any of these, but keep in mind that each was created for a different purpose. For instance, a very popular news-related topic taxonomy called the IAB Content Taxonomy (https://www.iab.com/guidelines/content-taxonomy/), which we also support, was designed for online advertising. As a result, it goes deeper into categories such as automotive and lifestyle. However, it doesn’t fully cover topics that are much more common in standard news stories, such as politics and economics.
Updates
As we mentioned earlier, one of the main advantages of IPTC Media Topics is that a team of people are constantly keeping the taxonomy up-to-date with the latest trends. They then release a new version several times a year. Updates typically include changes such as deprecating topics that are no longer relevant, introducing new topics, renaming existing topics, or changing the hierarchy to better reflect the real world. Geneea regularly checks for these updates and applies the changes into its own systems.
For instance, the latest version was published on March 31, 2023, and includes changes such as the following:
- 9 new topics were added: business reporting and performance, business restructuring, commercial real estate, residential real estate, podcast, financial service, business service, news industry and diversity, equity and inclusion.
- 60 topics were retired, including viniculture, wedding service, and buy recommendation
- 39 topics were renamed, including products and services, film industry, and renewable energy.
- 81 definitions were updated, including cybercrime, advertising, and crowdfunding.
Use cases for IPTC Media Topics
If you are still unsure as to whether Media Topics would be useful for your business, here are a few of the possible use cases.
- Tags
You’re probably already adding tags to the articles you publish online (and, hopefully, they are delivered by our system). You could expand the range of tags used in the text with Media Topics. For example, readers would certainly appreciate seeing tags that describe the content of the article. It would be good too if some tags were links to other articles in the same category. Tagging articles would allow you to go even further. For example, you could customize a newsletter for each reader based on their preferences by incorporating only those articles that fall into one of their favorite categories.
- Performance and content analysis
If articles are classified with Media Topics, a newsroom can see which topics are popular (and which are not). It can also see which categories are outperforming others. Say you have 50 articles about various royal families. Since all of them would be classified under “royalty,” your editors can easily determine whether this is a trending topic.
- Advertisement targeting
Many customers want (or don’t want) to place their ads in articles on only certain topics. Using IPTC Media Topics is one way to identify such articles. However, as we mentioned before, there is another content taxonomy that is even better suited for this use case and that is the IAB taxonomy. We support that one too.
How Geneea can help you
If you are wondering why we are interested in classifying content, well, it’s because we have a great tool that can automatically categorize articles. It’s based on a model we trained with our own annotated data. The tool can assign IPTC categories to an article based on its content. The main advantage of our model is that it is multilingual, as it knows more than 50 languages, including all the common ones.
*Example of IPTC Media Topics automatically assigned to an article by the Geneea model