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IPTC Media Topics 2023 Q1 Update

In March 2023 the IPTC unveiled their biggest ever update to the Media Topic taxonomy. TextRazor now offers complete support for this new version.

The IPTC Media Topic classifier has proven popular not just among news organizations, but also as a general-purpose solution for a wide range of classification projects. With 1100 categories, it remains our most widely-used broad domain classifier and a go-to choice for many.

Common feedback on the existing Media Topic taxonomy is that it's too specific in certain niches. For example, the "Judo" node previously had 7 sub children, which is only of interest to a small set of users. These have now been cleared up. Additionally, the updated taxonomy incorporates new nodes absent from the previous version, such as "Artificial Intelligence" and "Cryptocurrency."

We've also used this update as an opportunity to make some algorithmic improvements to specific parts of the taxonomy. You should see slightly better results in certain domains.

There are around 200 changes to the Media Topic nodes, but the majority are minor changes to their labels. The Media Topic IDs that TextRazor returns are backward compatible with the previous version, giving a straightforward upgrade path. We will continue to support the previous version, so no rush to switch.

To upgrade, just add the classifier textrazor_mediatopics_2023Q1 to your requests. The full set of available topics is available from the IPTC in various formats.