Announcing Pop-Up Newsroom: Riksdagsvalet 2018.

Over the last five days of Sweden’s election more than a hundred journalists will come together to design and implement a newsroom that will track misinformation.

Sweden is heading towards a close election that could have a significant impact on the country’s political landscape. In a real-time news environment, and amidst growing concerns around so-called “fake news”, the stakes are high for election coverage.

Supported by the Google News Initiative, Pop-Up Newsroom Riksdagsvalet 2018 will see more than 100 journalists gather in one place to design solutions that will aid in the monitoring of information flowing across digital sources in the final days of the election. The newsroom will be populated by the next generation of Sweden’s journalists from three prestigious journalism schools.

As well as real-time election monitoring and coverage, this live environment will promote hands-on training and foster editorial and technical innovation. Sweden’s media houses and Swedish voters will be able to ask the newsroom to turn its attention to specific subjects if required (see below).

The progress of this editorial and design initiative will be shared for the duration of its operation between 5–9 September across a variety of digital sources and updates, including a live-stream from the Pop-Up Newsroom at Goto 10, a space for internet related knowledge exchange and innovation operated by the Internet Foundation in Sweden (IIS).

The Pop-Up Newsroom team will pick up where they left off with their most recent high-profile social monitoring and verification project, the hugely successful #Verificado2018 in Mexico. We’ll take the lessons learned there and move them forwards.

DESIGN PROCESS AND OUTPUTS

Participants from the project core leadership team mapped stakeholders in April’s “training and framing” workshop.

The critical processes and outputs will be decided through two days of co-design workshops at Södertörn Högskola and take into consideration the input of all stakeholders. While we won’t know the exact outcomes until the workshop happens, the broad areas of focus will be the following:

• Creating a real-time, physical newsroom for several days over the election period
• Digital newsgathering, verification and fact-checking
• Monitoring the flow of information to and from typically underserved and diverse communities within Sweden, including but not limited to non-Swedish speaking voters and non-voters
• Tracking the sources of information and misinformation from outside the mainstream media and identify instances of media manipulation
• Creation of workflows and processes that support and connect journalists in both physical and digital scenarios
• Connect output from the Pop-Up Newsroom with Sweden based media houses and work side-by-sidewith journalists where possible
• To prototype and simulate new workflows and technical approaches in preparation for the 2019 European elections
• To build on the processes of previous Pop-Up Newsrooms to further integrate the use of design thinking to inform editorial workflows and products

Pop-Up Newsroom is working with a range of editorial, academic and technical partners for Riksdagsvalet 2018.

If you are a newsroom or journalist and want to get involved then email us: riksdagsvalet@popup.news

If you want to follow the progress of this and all of our other projects then follow us on Twitter.