NewsML, the emerging industry standard for structuring multi-media news, combined with rich metadata promises to revolutionise the way journalists create stories and users receive information.

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) derivative allows news companies to take advantage of expanding bandwidth that makes multi-media news feasible and the growth of common standards which let computers easily communicate with other computers.

Reuters conceived the idea of NewsML in 1998 and donated it to the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) to develop as an open standard. The 50-member news industry standards group agreed a beta version in July and NewsML was ratified as the official standard on the 6th October 2000.

NewsML allows journalists to create a new, higher-value type of story, packaging together text, pictures, text, graphics, audio and video as appropriate to tell stories more vividly and effectively.

Because the news is structured, devices receiving the news can select the appropriate content. For example, a Web page being viewed over a broadband link might show all media types including video while a current-generation mobile phone might receive only a text headline as an SMS message.

NewsML allows a range of metadata to be attached to a multi-media story, including a detailed computer-readable description of what an item is about.

Thus stories can be selected for appropriate media type and content, making it highly relevant to a user and appropriate to a platform.