Every real-life event is in its nature a multimedia event. News try to capture information about the events into various data formats to make it suitable for delivery to the recipients. But, as the number of information sources constantly grows, recipients are overflooded with the information. At the same time, they lack the ability to select relevant information without having to actually process all the information they receive.
The paper presents how XML can utlilize metadata to describe content and structure of the data it carries.
It shows how NewsML, an XML based standard for news exchange, uses metadata to enable content filtering, version handling, correction management, choosing between multiple data formats and other features format supports.

Attention is paid to the XML features and XML-related standards that enable such a behavior and to the reasons why some techniques have or have not been used by the standard.
In conclusion, it is shown how NewsML interacts with other relevant standards and discussed whether it can be used outside the news environment as a general-purpose data wrapper.