• by Joe Mandese , July 10, 2009

In a bid to make news content published online more accountable, more relevant and eminently more readable and valuable, London-based publishing advocacy group Media Standards Trust has teamed up with the Associated Press to promote a new news "microformat" encapsulating standardized information about every news story published online in their meta data files. The move follows Google's decision last May to begin supporting microformats in the snippets of news search results.

The new proposed microformat would include critical information about news stories, including: * What the story is about
* Where it was written
* Who wrote it
* Where it was published
* The news principles it adheres to (if any)
* Any usage rights associated with it

The organizations said the news microformat is non-proprietary, open source and is being offered as a standard for anyone publishing news content online.

It is already being piloted by human rights advocacy group openDemocracy.net, and is being tested on all of the AP's text-based news content.

The AP's stories are available in the new format via the AP Developer API, which also is in beta testing, and AP's Web Feeds platform, an Internet-based distribution platform for AP.