Inside Norway’s plan to be the first to scale Content Credentials in its news ecosystem

News publishers worldwide are increasingly turning to C2PA Content Credentials to give audiences a way to verify and trust what they're seeing, but no country has yet pulled off widespread, visible implementation across its entire news industry. Norway is trying to be first: the country has set a goal of 80% adoption of C2PA across its news ecosystem by the end of 2026, a target that would make it the world leader in news implementation of the standard.

Behind that goal is Media Cluster Norway, a non-profit membership organization for media companies and media tech companies aiming to create more collaboration, upskilling, and recruitment into the industry. Its initiative, Project Reynir, is a cross-industry collaboration to implement C2PA in newsrooms across Norway, running on that same network of media companies, media tech companies, and academic institutions that Media Cluster Norway has built.

I spoke with Marianne Fjellhaug, Senior Project Manager at Media Cluster Norway and lead of Project Reynir, about the collaborative culture that's made this scale of ambition possible, the internal alignment challenges that have proven harder to solve than the technical ones, and her advice for media organizations and consortiums around the world hoping to follow Norway's example.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your background. What brought you into this role?

Media Cluster Norway has worked on battling mis- and disinformation as one of several initiatives since I started in 2020, with all our efforts centered on innovation and collaboration. I spent my first years there working with media tech startups and scaleups, helping them scale, which gave me a close look at how technology shapes the industry. When Project Reynir came together with our members and partners, it was a chance to apply that experience to implementing technology into our trust work more hands-on.

How many organizations are involved in Project Reynir?

Media Cluster Norway has over 90 members, and Project Reynir specifically involves about 20 organizations, and the news organizations at a conglomerate level.

80% adoption in the Norwegian news ecosystem by end of 2026 is an impressive goal, and one that seems out of reach for other countries’ media industries. If successful, this would make Norway the world leader in news implementation of C2PA, setting a model to replicate. What factors contribute to Norway’s ability to pursue adoption at this scale?

It's an ambitious goal, and we're well aware of that. But if any country is positioned to pull this off at scale, it's Norway. We have a strong culture of collaboration, both from this project and from other initiatives across the industry. That collaboration runs newsroom-to-newsroom, tech-company-to-tech-company, and tech-company-to-newsroom.

On top of that, Norwegian newsrooms are already at the forefront of digitization of news. They're pushing hard to deliver high-quality news and strong products to end users, and applying technology toward better journalism. Maintaining and improving trust with those end users is something they focus on constantly, and that makes this kind of work a natural extension of what they're already prioritizing.

As one point of comparison, Media Cluster Norway is also running a sensor journalism project where the largest news conglomerates in the country collaborate on shared infrastructure: physical radar networks collecting flight data that isn't available through public platforms, including information on private jets, rescue helicopters, and military flights that's otherwise redacted. 

Newsrooms collaborate on the sourcing, technology, and infrastructure, then compete on the journalism produced from that shared data. It's not directly comparable to C2PA in scope, but it's evidence of the same collaborative model working at scale.

How far along are you toward this goal?

No Norwegian news company has implemented Content Credentials in a way that's visible to end users yet. But all of the country's biggest news conglomerates are involved in the project, each on their own timeline. There's meaningful work happening inside some of the newsrooms already that I won't detail yet, but we're close to several of them actually implementing it and showing it to end users, hopefully with the first proof-of-concepts within 2026.

Together with Show Your Work Lab (SYWL), we're piloting Content Credentials as a proof of concept with three brands from Norway's largest newspaper conglomerates: Verdens Gang (Schibsted), Bergensavisen (Amedia), and Adresseavisa (Polaris Media), together accounting for over 70% of national newspaper circulation.

The structural advantage is that once one brand within a conglomerate implements support, it's more straightforward to extend that across the conglomerate's other brands. Norway has around 250 local newspapers. If five brands — one from each of the major conglomerates — implement Content Credentials, it becomes far easier to roll that out across the majority of these brands.

So even though we won’t reach our goal within 2026 in terms of adoption, the awareness, interest, and knowledge in the media industry for media provenance has increased massively over the course of the project. While there’s been good progress towards implementation, the work is nowhere near finished. Now we're looking forward to continuing this work beyond 2026, toward that same ambitious goal.

How does Reynir facilitate adoption among companies and conglomerates? Is there a shared workflow, or a unified set of policies and guidelines for implementation?

We're trying to make this more efficient through collaborative efforts, such as working groups made up of representatives from the different member companies, including the tech companies, tackling shared open questions together. For example, one working group developed a set of metadata guidelines with input from the biggest players, so it reflects their actual needs, though the final editorial decisions still sit with each organization.

We've also studied the impact on trust with our academic partner, MediaFutures, and built UX prototypes with a cross-organizational team of UX researchers, drawing on input from photojournalists, journalists, and technical staff to reflect what Norwegian newsrooms actually need. From there we user-tested and built a standardized workflow to identify where implementation is needed and where support already exists together.

The underlying principle is that we do the non-competitive work together — things like navigating certificates — rather than five separate times so no single newsroom has to solve it alone. We also feed in international input on C2PA, for instance through the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), connecting our members with people working on the standard globally.

The goal isn't a single shared product our members plug into. It's a consistent, holistic approach so that whenever an end user encounters Content Credentials at one news brand, the experience is the same at another. That consistency is what lets us simplify education for end users around what this means and how to use it.

What have been some of the challenges in aligning so many different stakeholders on one standard? Have any common themes emerged between organizations?

Early on in the project, 2023, it wasn't yet clear that C2PA would become the industry standard. Companies were all interested in using technology to improve and sustain trust in news media, but there was real debate about which technical standard and solution would get us there. That debate faded fairly quickly as the international work on C2PA made it increasingly clear that this would be the standard.

Since then, the harder alignment work hasn't been across organizations so much as within them, reconciling different internal perspectives. UX teams and photojournalism teams, for instance, come at implementation with genuinely different priorities and views on how it should work. A lot of the ongoing work is finding something everyone internally can get behind, and then aligning that across the roadmaps of both the newsrooms and the tech organizations involved.

How is Project Reynir funded?

It's funded by Agenda Vestland, a regional foundation connected to Sparebanken Norge, the largest savings bank in Norway. We're proud to have their support. In addition, the efforts of the pilot with SYWL is funded by Amediastiftelsen, an independent Norwegian foundation that owns Amedia.

Both Project Reynir and Media Cluster Norway operate as non-profits. This work is meant to benefit the industry, not to generate revenue for us.

What advice would you give to international media organizations and consortiums looking to follow Norway’s example?

Collaboration is key. There's a huge amount of knowledge sitting inside individual organizations, and real value in bringing people together to share that knowledge, along with experiences and best practices, the way we do through IPTC's media provenance groups. Everyone working on this is having the same conversations and running into similar problems, so sharing challenges and the solutions people are finding makes the work easier for everyone.

This isn't something that should be treated as competitive. It's about preserving and increasing trust in news media, which matters more now than ever, given the noise in the information landscape from generative AI and everything that comes with it.