Rather than spring any surprises at the IPTC meeting Washington
meeting next week, here is our position:

The New York Times recently sent a letter to The Associated Press
indicating our full support for their NITF development program, and
in contract negotiations we have said much the same to Reuters. I
hope our message at Heathrow was clear to our other wire service
partners: The Times views NITF as the currently accepted standard for
news markup, and we have asked our wire services to deliver NITF when
they launch XML products.

This is not to say that we oppose NewsML, but rather that we see
NITF and NewsML moving forward in parallel courses to solve separate
problems and partially serve separate customer bases.

Any effort to deprecate NITF in favor of an all-inclusive NewsML is
not, in our view, in the best interests of newspapers. Although laden
with some unnecessary structural elements and perhaps too much
esoteric tagging, the basic form of NITF does what we want and it
works. We view NewsML as a tagging scheme to allow multimedia to be
handled more gracefully than in NITF, and to replace the IIM for
routing and enveloping. In this view, the NewsML tagging could be
stripped without losing the most valuable part for newspapers -- the
text content tagging.

NITF's tagging was the result of years of negotiation, including
meetings with representatives from non-IPTC newspapers, online
services and broadcasters. Deals were struck and promises made;
compromises were reached with organizations that took our word when
we said that their concerns would be addressed. In the end, the three
major news industry groups -- IPTC, NAA and RTNDA -- endorsed NITF.
It was believed that wire services would soon follow up with
products. (Indeed, several IPTC members have been using NITF in one
way or another for several years.) Reopening these debates would
delay NewsML and NITF for many years, on the very eve of major
product launches by several vendors.

We are also concerned that some of the basic tenants of NITF will
be lost or muddied. We want a standard that can be used with
currently available XML tools, and we want it to follow generally
accepted programming standards used in the SGML and XML communities.
We want tags (such as byline) that can be sparingly added by hand in
the field without greatly complicating the lives of stringers and
freelancers.

By reopening the core of NITF's tagging scheme, we are nullifying
those endorsements and sowing confusion among vendors, newspapers,
online services, broadcasters and wire services. NITF must be allowed
to launch to launch and grow, and the lessons learned will be applied
to future iterations of NITF or NewsML.

Yes, NITF could lose some baggage. We don't oppose a well-reasoned
deprecation of certain tags. We also believe that NITF should be
focused on text markup and leave most IIM-related fields to NewsML.

The opportunity to launch NITF and NewsML can happen only once
every few decades. Sheer inertia and the typical news industry
business model makes system overhauls a rarity; look how long IPTC
7901 has survived. In the United States, more than 700 newspapers
must reconfigure their systems and for better or worse they will take
their cue from developments at the AP.

Newspapers, broadcasters and wire services constitute the largest
single bloc of Internet content providers. No other group comes close
to generating as much Web content as the news media. We are the
leadership in this field, and our authority is the sheer volume of
content that we provide. Vacillation by us would create a vacuum that
others would fill; thus we need to reconfirm NITF's status as this
organization's official, approved text standard.

We must resist the temptation to deprecate NITF, but also carefully
consider ridding it of tags that make its purpose unclear. NITF
documentation must be finished and posted immediately. As an
important initiative that should be expedited, NewsML must focus
exclusively on areas not handled by NITF. Online services that find
NITF unacceptable must offer constructive solutions without
sacrificing NITF's rich content markup. NewsML development cannot bog
down by revisiting issues long though settled in the NITF standard.

NITF treads a fine line: It is an XML scheme, but it need not be
used in XML systems. This makes it potentially useful to newspapers
and broadcasters large and small, domestic and foreign, rich and
poor. This is why we support it, and why we believe its deprecation
would be a calamity.

See you in Washington.

--- Walt

Walter R. Baranger : Phone +1 212 556 1154
Assistant to the Editor : Fax +1 212 556 7688
The New York Times :
229 West 43rd Street, 4th Floor : "All The News That Fits...
New York, N.Y. 10036 USA : ...I print."