The industry finally stopped theorizing and started building the infrastructure to preserve truth itself
We’ve reached the inflection point. Not the one we’ll read about in retrospect, but the one happening right now—where the exponential flood of AI-generated content threatens to drown out any meaningful signal of authenticity. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025 didn’t mince words: For the second year in a row, misinformation and disinformation rank as the top short-term risk.
Against this backdrop, on September 23, 2025, something quietly consequential happened in Bergen, Norway. While the world’s attention was elsewhere, the Media Provenance Summit convened at Mount Fløyen, not for another round of hand-wringing about the problem, but for the harder work of actually solving it.
Why Bergen? Why Now?
The summit’s host, Media Cluster Norway (formerly Media City Bergen), has transformed from a regional initiative into a global catalyst for media technology innovation. What started in the early 1990s when Norway’s TV 2 received its broadcast license has evolved into an ecosystem of over 100 companies with combined revenues exceeding $1 billion, including world-class players like Vizrt and a robust network spanning journalism, technology, and academia.
But Media Cluster Norway’s involvement goes deeper than logistical hosting. In 2023, the organization was accepted into Project Origin—the BBC, New York Times, and Microsoft-led consortium developing content provenance solutions. This spawned Project Reynir, Norway’s ambitious initiative to implement the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) standard across its entire news media ecosystem. With 10 million Norwegian kroner in funding ( about US $ 1 Million) from Agenda Vestlandet and participation from NRK, TV 2, Schibsted, NTB, and Faktisk.no, Project Reynir aims for 80% C2PA implementation across Norwegian newsrooms by the end of 2026, which would make Norway the first country to achieve large-scale adoption of the standard.
The summit itself was organized jointly by Media Cluster Norway, the BBC, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and IPTC, a collaboration that signals both the urgency and the global coordination required to address what amounts to an infrastructure challenge for democracy itself.
Who Actually Showed Up
This wasn’t a talking shop. Participants traveled from Japan, Australia, the United States, and Canada to join European colleagues in Bergen. The attendee list reads like a who’s who of global media infrastructure: BBC, NHK, AFP, Getty Images, CBS, DPA, France Télévisions, CBC/Radio-Canada, ITN, PA Media, WDR, Sony, Adobe, and technology vendors including Imatag, Activo, Fotoware, Vizrt, Wolftech, and Mimir.
Critically, the summit brought together three constituencies that rarely occupy the same room for long: news organizations grappling with daily authenticity challenges, technology vendors building the tools, and standards bodies like IPTC ensuring interoperability. This convergence matters because C2PA implementation isn’t a theoretical exercise, it’s a complex technical challenge requiring coordination across the entire content supply chain.
Beyond the Keynotes: The Real Work
The morning featured presentations from implementers. BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, AFP, and the European Broadcasting Union shared their experiences wrestling C2PA into real-world workflows. These weren’t slick product demos but honest accounts of friction points, edge cases, and the messy reality of retrofitting provenance infrastructure into decades-old systems.
But the afternoon’s breakout sessions revealed where the rubber meets the road. Key challenges under discussion included:
Preserving C2PA information through editorial workflows when not all tools yet support the technology. Every time content passes through a non-C2PA-aware application, the provenance chain risks breaking. This isn’t a minor technical hiccup,it’s the difference between a system that works in theory and one that works in practice.
When to sign content as it moves through the workflow, at device level, organizational level, or both? This seemingly technical question has profound implications for verification granularity and trust models. Sign too early and you can’t capture editorial modifications; sign too late and you lose the chain of custody from capture.
Confidentiality and privacy issues, including the protection of sources and sensitive material. C2PA’s transparency is a double-edged sword when journalists work with vulnerable sources or in authoritarian contexts. How do you prove authenticity without exposing the photographer who documented human rights abuses?
These aren’t problems that yield to elegant whitepapers. They require the kind of grinding, detailed collaboration that only happens when practitioners from different organizations compare notes and collectively debug their implementations.
What’s Really at Stake
Here’s what’s easy to miss about summits like this: the outcome isn’t a press release or a memorandum of understanding. It’s the accumulated knowledge that participants carry back to their organizations—the specific solutions to workflow bottlenecks, the shared understanding of where standards need refinement, the relationships that enable quick problem-solving when issues arise.
As the EBU reported, “The summit emphasized moving from problem analysis to solution exploration. Through structured sessions, participants defined key blockers, sketched practical solutions and developed action plans aimed at strengthening trust in digital media worldwide.”
This matters because content provenance is a collective action problem. If Getty Images implements C2PA but news organizations don’t verify it, the system fails. If photographers capture authentic metadata but editorial systems strip it out, the system fails. If the technology works perfectly but users don’t understand what the credentials mean, the system fails.
The Ripple Effect Beyond News
While media organizations convened this summit, the implications extend far beyond journalism. Every sector relying on digital communication faces the same credibility crisis. Legal proceedings need authenticated evidence. E-commerce brands need to protect their reputation from AI-generated imposters. Geographic information systems need trusted satellite imagery. Educational institutions need verifiable source material.
The C2PA infrastructure being stress-tested by news organizations will ultimately serve as the authentication layer for the entire digital ecosystem. When Project Reynir achieves its 80% implementation target in Norway, the lessons learned will inform deployment in financial services, healthcare, government communications, and enterprise environments globally.
As Media Cluster Norway CEO Helge Svela puts it: “Disinformation created by artificial intelligence is not just a media problem – it is a democratic problem. Project Reynir is a boost for our digital resilience.” This isn’t just about fighting deepfakes, it’s about establishing a new foundational layer for digital trust.
The Work Continues
One day in Bergen won’t solve the authenticity crisis. But it represents something more valuable than solutions: it represents process. The painstaking, unglamorous work of building consensus, debugging workflows, and creating the institutional knowledge required to deploy authentication infrastructure at scale.
The media organizations that participated aren’t waiting for perfect standards or frictionless technology. They’re implementing now, learning from failures, and sharing knowledge with competitors because they recognize that authenticity is an urgent public good that benefits everyone or no one.
The next time you see a Content Credential indicator on a news image, remember that behind that simple badge is a global network of journalists, technologists, and standards bodies who gathered in places like Bergen to make sure the chain of trust holds. In an era of infinite synthetic content, that chain might be the only thing standing between informed democracy and pure chaos.
The question isn’t whether we need this infrastructure. The question is whether we’re building it fast enough.
This article was first published in Dam News France
Main images by Photo by MAO YUQING on Unsplash
Author: Paul Melcher
Paul Melcher is a highly influential and visionary leader in visual tech, with 20+ years of experience in licensing, tech innovation, and entrepreneurship. He is the Managing Director of MelcherSystem and has held executive roles at Corbis, Gamma Press, Stipple, and more. Melcher received a Digital Media Licensing Association Award and has been named among the “100 most influential individuals in American photography”