Abstract

The transition to new standards of professional activity is very actual problem for modern Ukrainian journalism. Journalists of new generation have to work with new journalistic technical standards, such as standards of International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). IPTC creates and maintains sets of concepts to be assigned as metadata values to news objects like text, photos, graphics, audio- and video files and streams. The article deals with IPTC open standards for the news media. One of them – NewsCodes – combines taxonomies and controlled vocabularies for media. The groups of news codes depending on their purpose: descriptive, administrative, transmission and special are characterized. Media Topiсs is the subject taxonomy with a focus on categorizing text and belongs to descriptive NewsCodes for coding of news metadata. In the context of the NewsCodes, taxonomy is a collection of concepts with associated codes organized on a hierarchical basis. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the IPTC news codes and media topics. Results of qualitative and quantitative analyze of media topics are given in the paper. It has been established, that these topics differ in number of concepts, degree of branching and depth of distribution over hierarchical levels. The most extensive and branched topics are «Economy, business and finance» (23.52%), «Sport» (18.18%) and «Politics» (9.09%) which make up more than half (50.79%) of the total number of concepts. The least number of concepts on the topics are «Human interest» (1.12%) and «Weather» (0.47%). On average, media topics (such as «Science and technology», «Crime, law and justice», «Arts, culture and entertainment», «Society», «Education» etc.) contain from 20 to 58 subordinated concepts structured on five hierarchical levels.