Direct Publishing offers the potential for news organisations to take back control of their content, brand and data.

The first question you’ll ask is “what actually is direct publishing?” Well, it’s a term that encompasses a range of technologies, platforms and processes that create an experience that is directly between the publisher and the audience, without algorithmic influence or the risk of interception by bad actors. Direct Publishing is NOT just a different way of describing text messaging with your audience or just a fancy term for chat bots.

With Direct Publishing we are talking about something that is much richer than what has come before and based on technology that can be as versatile as your imagination will take you. The phrase richer also references the nature of the content itself; you can deliver photos or video to audiences through totally new experiences as stand-alone or entirely new products and verticals.

Crucially, Direct Publishing is a dedicated mobile experience that engages audiences in a familiar, trusted and highly active space.

“Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking.”

— Mark Zuckerberg, November 2014

For example: At one end you could create a new fully loaded “newsletter” experience, or with a lighter touch you can add to stories and interactions with audiences by doing things like giving people a reminder about a live event they can put directly into their calendar or share a locator map for a photo series. This all happens within the existing messaging ecosystem.

The second question you’ll probably ask is; “who is doing it right now? Show me loads of examples!”

Answer: This is really in its infancy but that is exactly why it is now time to act. The news and publishing industry have missed out countless times to those quicker to dominate a space. Looking to other industries, you can see that organisations like Oxfam, Subway and Vodafone have utilised this emerging tech in very different ways for their business needs, with considerable success.

At Fathm we are making it our mission to make sure publishers are able to start fully utilising the opportunities that Direct Publishing offers — and ensure they retain control over their publishing, data and relationships using this new format.

Not convinced this is a thing yet?

• Google has now completed its rollout of RCS (Rich Communication Services) technology meaning that access to services are now possible from the more than 2.5 billion active Android devices across the world
• A 2020 report by Mobilesquared says brands will spend $52.5 billion on RCS by 2028 diverting spend from banner ads to messaging campaigns

There are big commercial opportunities for publishers here:

• You control the ad space in your direct publishing environment; from ad placements in content carousels to entire sponsored experiences.
• Direct Publishing technology also allows you to take payments directly, so there are opportunities to upsell additional or premium content or services.
• You can also use it to drive and convert subscriptions.

Content strategy is essential

Remember when everyone used to say “you can’t just use the same content you put in your paper on your website?” Or — “video is not just TV news but on the web?” Direct Publishing demands — and deserves — its own editorial content, audience engagement and growth strategies.

You can’t just serve up a link via a Direct Publishing service — it is a waste of the technology’s potential and it creates an underwhelming product experience for your audience.

To be successful you need to think about optimisation in two core areas:

• The interactive flow and user journey must reflect the voice of your journalism, brand, product or organisation. This is not a chat bot, this is an access point to your rich storytelling.
• The content should be as amazing as your journalism and give the same quality experience you offer elsewhere. You can deliver in almost any format and you only need to worry about it being fully optimised for mobile.

Technology

The easy bit: For the majority of direct publishing opportunities your audience don’t need any new apps, in fact the pre-installed messaging app on the phone is pretty much it.

The slightly less easy bit: To get up and running with a direct publishing product or initiative your newsroom will need to be set up with a few things. You will need to technically build the product with one of the service providers who have the infrastructures to connect you with the networks and platforms. Fathm has a strategic relationship with IMIMobile — a leading service provider in this space— to provide services to the publishing industry. Fathm can take you all the way through from concept to delivery and then through to long term sustainability.

The jargon: The two protocols/platforms/ delivery methods that you should be thinking about as your entry point into Direct Publishing is RCS (Rich Communication Services) and GBM (Google Business Messenger). There are lots more but if you build an experience on these first two, rolling it out across additional formats is not a heavy lift.

Let’s do this

At Fathm we have been excited about the opportunities of Direct Publishing for a long time.

This moment builds on work we have done in Mexico to fight misinformation by directly engaging with the audience on WhatsApp and partnering with AJ+ to deliver content specifically designed for that format.

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In India we have seen the power of WhatsApp tiplines we have helped create as a means of engaging with the audience outside of the a social network’s algorithm. We see how people feel safer interacting in a private, direct communication environment.

We have also been working for the last few years on content formats that are designed purely for on demand access and interaction via messaging.

Want to learn more about how Fathm can support you in Direct Publishing? Email me us at hello@fathm.co and we will set up a call.

“Direct Publishing” is going to be a big deal for journalism. Get ready. was originally published in Fathm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To glimpse the future of global news consumption, look to India — home to a sixth of the world’s population. A recent survey on India by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 68% of respondents identified smartphones as their main source of news; 82% were users of WhatsApp, with 52% of those people getting news on the platform.

With more than 400M users in India, WhatsApp is just one of the numerous private messaging apps with massive user bases, where people share and consume news — and as has been observed repeatedly — viral misinformation. This poses new challenges and opportunities for journalists, who since 2019 have been driving creative responses to engage audiences on these rapidly growing platforms.

In this environment building and sustaining an audience base is challenging for newsrooms even as it proves to be vital in addressing misinformation at scale, something that is essential with such high use of private messaging apps.

Reporters and editors in India are at the forefront of a new type of information delivery: one that is on- demand, fast, low-fi and has the potential to both inform and misinform without scrutiny. A new type of journalism is needed and it couldn’t matter more.

Using tiplines to engage audiences

Many newsrooms advertise phone numbers on their websites through which they regularly crowdsource content. Some newsrooms in India have also participated in a WhatsApp pilot that allowed people to send in leads for fact-checking from their WhatsApp accounts to a newsroom’s account. The idea behind seeking content through multiple sources is of course to get a broader sense of the misinformation trends across platforms and private-messaging networks. However, in the process newsrooms often find themselves saddled with large volumes of data that teams do not have the resources to deal with.

Fathm has worked with leading newsrooms in India to help them streamline their fact-checking workflows and offered them bespoke solutions to complement their scale of operations. That experience has shown us that it is imperative for a newsroom to clearly communicate with the audiences about their subject matter expertise, have a fast turnaround time for fact-checking and develop new formats and distribution strategies. This helps newsrooms in creating an identity for their brand of journalism.

Mutual skill and knowledge exchange

Even as fact-checking organisations compete with each other, there is a certain level of cohesion within the existing ecosystem. On large WhatsApp groups of fact-checkers, created primarily to exchange information on trainings and resources, members tend to notify each other if they spot a video, audio clip, or visual that has gone viral or has the potential to go viral. Sometimes that item is in a regional language as opposed to Hindi or English, and may have a subtext that is not widely understood, in such situations the language and cultural expertise that is voluntarily offered by members can be extremely useful in debunking any misinformation related to it.

There is a growing trend among fact-checking sites to publish reports in major Indian languages, such as Bengali, in addition to Hindi and English. A few new sites are also focusing on checking misinformation that is local to a particular region, such as southern India and at least a couple of newsrooms have expanded their operations to fact-check content from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar; publishing in Bengali, Sinhala, and Burmese respectively.

However, the job of Indian fact-checkers is often complicated by the fact that they are operating in a society deeply polarised on religious and political issues. It has been seen repeatedly in India that online hate has the potential to spill over to the streets and kill people. Fact-checking teams often find themselves dispelling viral false claims unleashed apparently as part of sustained disinformation campaigns targeting individuals in public life or members of a religious community.

Training at Scale

Indian journalists are rising to the challenges that a rise in misinformation presents. The number of fact-checking teams in India has substantially increased over the last two years. There are now 15 in the country that are certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN); the most in one country. They have also had some help. Companies like Facebook and Google have invested heavily in training Indian journalists and journalism educators on fact-checking and verification.

Training on such a grand scale has the possibility to tip the balance. Journalists from both big and small newsrooms across India get taught by experts about the best practices, tools, and techniques on debunking. They take back those lessons and train their colleagues, organise workshops for fellow journalists at press clubs across India; and even engage with college and university students, offering them practical tips for identifying “fake news”. Some of these journalists have worked with leading Indian journalism schools to develop modules on media literacy and fact-checking so that students can enter the industry with a more diversified skillset. To date more than 20,000 people have been trained through Google’s programme alone, making it the largest network of its kind in the world.

Looking ahead

With misinformation taking myriad forms every day, the road ahead for Indian fact-checkers is bumpy, yet there is light at the end of the tunnel: there are new opportunities to collaborate on initiatives, develop tools and techniques to counter misinformation spread via private messaging apps and build public awareness. It is promising to see that people from non-journalistic backgrounds are eagerly joining fact-checking teams.

The rapidly growing cadre of fact-checkers in India play a crucial role in ensuring that the Indian public has access to credible and reliable news. There is much work to be done, but the pioneering work of Indian fact-checkers provides a helpful blueprint for the challenges and solutions that journalists around the world may benefit from in coming years.

World News Day aims to raise awareness of the critical role that journalists play in providing credible and reliable news, to help people make sense of — and improve — the rapidly changing world around them.

Written by Pamposh Raina with contributions from Tom Trewinnard and Fergus Bell.

To learn more about the work mentioned above please contact us: hello@fathm.co

World News Day 2020: What the global journalism community can learn from fact checking in India was originally published in Fathm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re offering a free assessment, impact report and implementation guidance for newsrooms who need support now.

The Distributed Newsroom Playbook is designed to help newsrooms optimise for a future of distributed work — moving beyond immediate crisis coverage and remain sustainable in turbulent times.

We have had amazing feedback from the journalism community with suggestions for expansion, translation and further development and we hope to raise funding* to do as much as possible.

We had to create the Playbook in a way that everyone could take advantage of but we are well aware that implementation will be different for everyone. We have had people reach out to ask us directly for help and we wanted to offer that process up to more people. This is an urgent need and if we don’t find a way to support the news industry with this transition now then it will be too late for some.

How to get our help with a transition to distributed operations (for free)

1. Fill in a survey

Navigate here and fill in the survey that we have put together. It will ask you questions related to your set-up, challenges, immediate needs and longer term strategy.

2. Analysis

Playbook authors and Fathm consultants will analyse the survey answers based on our experience across a comprehensive range of disciplines.

3. Impact Assessment

We’ll provide you with an overview of the areas we think deserve immediate consideration and processes of the transition that should be prioritised. We’ll also give you a number of clear recommendations for what you need to do.

4. Implementation Plan

We’ll provide you with detail about how we might be able to help you implement the recommendations specific to your organisation.

All of the services above will be offered to organisations free of charge. As part of the implementation plan we will advise you of the services that Fathm can offer to support you at the next stage of transition. While we would love to work with you there is absolutely no obligation to do so.

Once again, you can find the survey here.

Please note: only one survey should be completed for an organisation and it should be with the knowledge of a decision maker. We will endeavour to respond to as many submissions that meet the criteria as possible.

*If you are a funder or have a suggestion for how we can get additional support to develop the Playbook we would love for you to get in touch. hello@fathm.co

Supporting newsrooms in transitioning to distributed operations was originally published in Fathm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A new resource to support newsrooms to quickly return to full functionality in a world that has been turned upside down.

With the start of social distancing policies as a response to the COVID-19 crisis, newsrooms have quickly had to reconfigure as distributed, digital spaces. We are going to be working within distributed frameworks for a significant amount of time, far beyond the immediate crisis and disruption the start of this outbreak has caused.

The Distributed Newsroom Playbook from Fathm, supported by the Google News Initiative, has been designed to help organisations chart a sustainable path forward.

Our industry needs to prepare for the long haul now because our survival has never been more under threat while at the same time we have never been needed more. There are immense challenges to the business of news but as our audiences continue to rely on us to meet their needs we must be able to serve them and to do that we have to return to full functionality with a world that has been turned upside down.

It’s likely that this shift will not end with the end of COVID-19, and it is our hope that with this playbook newsrooms can better imagine how to harness some of the benefits of distributed work and avoid some of the common pitfalls.

Designed to meet our most immediate needs, this first version of the playbook includes the following sections:

• Managing distributed teams
• Workflows and structures
• Editorial
• Training
• Audience Engagement
• Technology & Tools

Many newsrooms are already applying some of the practices and technologies we are recommending, so please consider this guide as a holistic resource that can offer some new ideas and strategies.

We also know that with fast change and unprecedented disruption, long term strategic thinking is a luxury. The experts in newsroom innovation who have contributed to the playbook have tried to do some of this forward thinking for you while you are doing incredibly important work to cover the impact of the global pandemic.

We believe it’s important to think of the current shift not as one to “remote work” — which conjures images of the lonely lighthouse keeper — but rather to “distributed teams” — where a sense of unity and common purpose is retained, and some of the collegial spirit and human care of physical spaces is translated to a digital world.

As innovative solutions to new challenges emerge, we will update the playbook with case studies, new technologies, and new strategies for working effectively as a distributed team. We’ll also take on board your suggestions for additional areas this needs to cover in order to help newsrooms operate sustainably in the long term.

The Distributed Newsroom Playbook has been produced by Fathm. For questions or suggestions for how this could be expanded please contact hello@fathm.co

Thank you to the Google News Initiative for their support.

The Distributed Newsroom Playbook was originally published in Fathm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For journalists who are displaced or stuck at home — or for those who are independents/freelancers and have experience and extra capacity that they could throw into this story — the feeling of being in the middle of a story and not having a way to tell it is frustrating. For a local news organisation who has had to send people home or who have staff that can’t get back to town there is going to also be a huge frustration.

So why don’t we see how we can club together to help each other out?

If you can help other journalists or news organisations — or if you’re a newsroom in need of additional help — throw up a #journobeacon!

What kind of thing are you talking about?

Anything you can offer, throw it out there and see if it can be of use to your colleagues elsewhere, e.g:

Good at fact checking or verification? There is going to be plenty of help needed for obvious reasons.

What about polishing off your radio reporting skills or your news writing and let your local radio station, TV station or newspaper that you would be happy to help however they could use you?

If you are stuck in the house and can’t move then you could even just let folk know where in the world you and that you could do a phone or Skype interview with colleagues at other news organisations about what life is like where you are.

I’m sold, what next?

Tweet or write a public Facebook post including #journobeacon with four key pieces of information:

• Who you are
• What you can do and how you want to help
• Where you are (use a #tag location)
• How you can be verified and contacted (e.g. LinkedIn, email address, open DMs)

Running a newsroom and need extra help?

Follow the hashtag and post what you need help with, and we’ll help triage the people sending their info and try and match you with someone who can help.

Journalists unite. Throw up a #journobeacon to let colleagues know how and where you can pitch in. was originally published in Fathm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today we are launching Fathm — an independent news lab, consultancy and agency with a mission to spark creative and impactful innovation and change for the journalism industry.

Introducing Fathm

Fathm will work directly with organisations, journalists, technologists and newsrooms to test and implement creative solutions to emergent challenges. As an independent news lab we want to be able to move fast and create new avenues for experimentation and consulting on strategy, products, training and projects.

These are some of the services that Fathm can offer organisations:

• Innovation Lab: Facilitating product prototyping to help you design and test technical and editorial products in an independent news lab environment.
• Organisational Transformation: Working with stakeholders from across your organisation to run human-centred design sprints, framing and defining problems before leading a process of creative ideation to capitalise on new opportunities.
• Editorial Strategy: Collaborate with your team to help design and implement efficient and robust digital workflows and standards for newsgathering, verification, fact-checking, publishing, social media and newsletters that are optimised for trust and sustainability.
• Closed Network Strategy: Reach your audience where they are by making your content available on-demand. We’ll also help you with the workflows, newsroom training, audience engagement and publishing on private messaging apps.
• Project Management: Need help running a project? We can do that for you — from design to implementation and evaluation — with your team or with one that we build.
• Initiatives and Events: We design and implement large-scale high-impact initiatives and events around the world. We can also build teams and add capacity where needed.
• Training: We can help your organisation identify critical gaps in skills and knowledge, and then design and deliver comprehensive training programs that target those areas.

The Team

Fergus Bell and Tom Trewinnard are the co-founders of Fathm.

Fergus is an experienced journalist, editor and consultant. His experience spans both the business and editorial sides of the news industry. A journalist for 16 years, he has worked for organisations including CNN, ITN and The Associated Press. Since 2015 he has been an independent consultant advising broadcasters, publishers and start-ups on social and digital newsgathering, newsroom transformation and innovation.

Tom has ten years’ experience working at the intersection of technology and journalism, leading high-impact international media projects and driving product strategy for collaborative technologies. Formerly Director of Programs at Meedan, Tom led Check Global, a programme dedicated to developing innovative open source tools and training programs for journalists, fact checkers and human rights researchers around the world.

Over the past three years Fergus and Tom have lead multi-award winning collaborations around the world.

If you work with us you’ll have access to some of the best practitioners and consultants in the business. Fathm works with a network of associate consultants, all respected industry professionals with extensive in-role experience in their specific areas of expertise.

Laura Oliver is a journalist with a background in audience development and social media strategy. She was head of social and communities for the Guardian and editor of Journalism.co.uk and has launched and managed social media channels and policy, built online communities, managed multidisciplinary teams and run editorial desks and projects.

Eoghan Sweeney is an independent consultant and expert trainer specialising in the verification of online content and information, and open source investigation, with more than two decades of experience in print, broadcast and online media.

Pamposh Raina is based in Delhi and has been a staff reporter with The New York Times and Special Correspondent, South Asia, for AFP covering policy, politics, gender, and child rights. Her recent work has focussed on analysing misinformation and disinformation on social media and closed messaging apps in India.

Andrew Mills is the co-founder of Jumpline, a community hub driving the transformation of journalism education. He works with organisations and universities to develop and implement new ways of learning. As a professor, his teaching has focused on media innovation, international reporting and the use of emerging technology to gather news and tell stories.

Yusof Abdul-Rahman is a journalist and consultant with a current focus on video, convergence strategy, and news transformation. He spent 20 years with the Associated Press in London and Beijing. He has also worked at Euronews, Europe’s major multilingual broadcast channel.

Tom Law is an experienced media development consultant and journalism trainer. He is a former deputy director of the Ethical Journalism Network and his wide-ranging experience in communications, policy and programmes include working with inter-governmental, humanitarian, media, and civil society organisations.

Over the past ten years the members of this team has been at the forefront of innovation and experimentation in newsgathering, publishing, digital strategy, newsroom technologies, and large- scale collaborative journalism initiatives. We will be expanding our associate consultant programme over the coming months in order to meet identified industry needs.

Let’s get to work! If Fathm sounds like a great fit for your organisation please get in touch via hello@fathm.co

Work with Fathm was originally published in Fathm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Trust is not competitive. Trust in media benefits us all — from voters to editors, from media owners to platform owners. We have to earn that trust but we don’t have to build it alone and it doesn’t have to be a one way transaction.

Designing 2020

In April 2019 Pop-Up Newsroom assembled a group of prominent journalists, editors, innovators, educators, technologists and funders in Washington DC. The aim was to explore how news organisations might collaborate to innovate around the coverage of the 2020 elections. We absolutely did not gather to design a misinformation fighting initiative — that would be way too 2018 of us. Instead, this would be about how we might collaborate to form a trusted reporting initiative with the fight against misinformation baked in at the foundation. How could we explore new ways to get stories from America’s news deserts, its heartlands and from the people who haven’t been given a voice for a long time, if ever at all?

Pop-Up Newsroom’s method brings stakeholders together to work through a version of co-design in order to start with a blank slate and fully explore where the challenges lie and what the possible solutions could be. There were absolutely no preconceived ideas of what we would come out with. But we did come up with something.

“A collaboration of journalists, technologists, education institutions and communities to establish a transparent information gathering and sharing system based on civic engagement and listening to empower informed participation in democracy…”

…or to keep it simple. We created the outline of a concept for a new Listening Cooperative.

Challenges & Priorities

Using processes to map stakeholders and challenges the group — over a significant period of time — were able to frame the most important challenges regarding the coverage of the 2020 election cycle and allowing US voters to make free and fair choices.

A process of prioritisation then helped determine what would be an essential to a large media collaboration. The below prioritisation bullseye reflects the consensus of the assembled and diverse group.

Putting listening at the heart of collaboration

We had a clear set of priorities to serve American voters and media. Any collaboration must:

• Reach underserved communities across America — and tackling this in the widest sense possible
• Create a shared and efficient actionable database of content and information from the election cycle that can help inform the electorate — containing anything and everything from political claims, memes and fact-checks to stump speeches, ads and untold stories.
• Avoid amplifying misinformation — not a misinformation project but one that uses everything we know about the spread of misinformation to stop it at the earliest possible opportunity it its lifecycle.
• Create an equal transaction with audiences — simply, if we want something from our audiences, we have to give them something back of equal or greater value.

Creating an equal transaction between media and audiences

For the media:

Listening to people in a way that they feel heard can’t be done at scale with technology and can’t be done as an academic exercise that is analysed way beyond the time when people head to the polls.

To listen to people we have to be where they are. We have to be accessible. The media has to have a face and that face needs to show that it is hearing.

We are not reinventing the wheel here. Local news reporters are doing this all day, every day - but what we haven’t been able to do before is work together to unearth the questions and concerns that ordinary voters have at any given time on any given day. A national collaboration will help local media scale in a way that hasn’t been possible before to give us data that can generate new types of stories, data and national insight.

For Americans:

A large-scale journalistic collaboration has the power to both listen to and serve content to our audiences at the same time. A listening cooperative can combine the latest storytelling techniques with the latest personalised on-demand delivery technology to serve branded, trust-optimised content to those who ask for it. At the most basic level they should be able to ask “is this true?” and be served with a response in a reasonable amount of time.

This also means giving them an opportunity to interact with the media. By mobilising our future journalists through an unprecedented collaboration with the country’s J-Schools we can get more of us out there to hear those untold stories and give the media a face. Such an operation would have the implicit aim of expanding the newsgathering and storytelling power of those journalists who are already out there with their boots on the ground.

What it looks like

How we do this

We will be working with news organisations, educators, start-ups, platforms and funders to develop this further and make it a reality. Nobody who attended the workshop was asked to commit to anything beyond that, although we are pleased to say that many have already said they are in!

If this is something you and your organisation or institution want to be a part of then please reach out and we will set up a time to speak and work out how you can be involved. This is a live process that will adapt to all inputs. We want you to help shape this. Please email 2020@popup.news

Likewise, if you are working on something similar and there are ways we can combine efforts instead of duplicate then let’s talk!

We plan to start building this as soon as possible and are already planning a workshop that will help us build the infrastructure for the community collaboration element.

We hope that you will join us on this journey!

The “Designing 2020” workshop was supported by the Facebook Journalism Project, Google News Initiative and the Knight Foundation.

Thank you also to AJ+ for hosting us.

The author of this article is British (sorry) which is why British English has been used and it has not been translated into the local dialect.

BUILDING A “LISTENING COOPERATIVE” FOR 2020 was originally published in Pop-Up Newsroom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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

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

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.

Announcing Pop-Up Newsroom: Riksdagsvalet 2018. was originally published in Pop-Up Newsroom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How Pop-Up Newsroom’s workflows are being applied to Verificado 2018 — Mexico’s collaborative election initiative

Verificado 2018 is a large-scale journalistic collaboration between more than 90 media partners, working together to debunk misinformation, fact check claims, and verify media ahead of the biggest elections in Mexico’s history. Pop-Up Newsroom is one of three lead partners (along with AJ+ Español and Animal Político), and helped launch the initiative in March with a four day workshop of training and co-design.

Large multi-stakeholder collaborations with complex information flows and multiple verification processes require careful and robust workflow design, taking into account a range of technologies, types of content, roles and functions. The Pop-Up Newsroom methodology for designing this type of process is iterative, and collaborative — we work with the various stakeholders to ensure that processes are flexible and serve observed needs, and build on the collective expertise and experience of the project partners.

Mapping it out

We start any Pop-Up Newsroom project with training and framing sessions. This is designed to get everyone on the same page but we are ultimately working towards devising a workflow that everyone can buy into and work to. The workflow above is the result of many iterations and there are still many more to come as we head into election day. The starting point is a generic workflow that we have used for previous Pop-Ups (see below).

Working with technologists

Technology is an important element of the newsroom processes and we’ve integrated technology and technologists wherever possible.

Throughout the day, journalists will be adding images, videos, links and claims to Meedan’s open source collaborative verification platform Check. Check provides a shared verification process for different types of content (videos and WhatsApp chains, for example may require different verification steps), and a way to assign reports and tasks to specific members of the Verificado team.

The Facebook partnerships team have hooked the newsroom up with CrowdTangle. It is on permanent display next to our production desk meaning that we can see what output is performing well — both our own and from others.

Tweetdeck is an essential tool for those working on our newsgathering team. Structured monitoring is essential for small teams and it ensures that journalists aren’t doubling up but can also cast their nets wider and get more than just the low hanging fruit.

We’re also working with AI through Krzana’s newsroom tool that allows us to enter hundreds of key words, phrases and politicians in order to surface content from thousands of sources.

How is it going?

It is impossible to tell how much impact the workflow is having but we are telling good stories and we are able to do it fast. We are stopping blockages in the process because we are able to both identify the problems and solutions quickly — and most importantly communicate them out to the teams.

Here’s a few examples of the things that have come out of the Verificado newsroom since we all moved into one place:

#Verificado2018 on Twitter

No, el 36% de los funcionarios del INE Estado de México no renunciaron, como lo dicen algunos portales de noticias. Roberto Heycher, director ejecutivo de capacitación electoral y educación cívica del INE, manda esta aclaración a @VerificadoMX https://t.co/xcnUihw3oc

#Verificado2018 on Twitter

Es falso que @belindapop cobrara 42 millones de pesos por presentarse en el cierre de campaña de @lopezobrador_; las supuestas facturas que circulan en redes son falsas https://t.co/d2aKGQh96u

#Verificado2018 on Twitter

Un video editado que circula en redes sociales muestra a Ricardo Anaya hablando con panistas de Guanajuato, este ha sido sacado de contexto para simular que el candidato acepta que perderá la elección. ¡Que no te engañen! @VerificadoMX te enseña el video sin edición ni cortes: https://t.co/esVZDEy3wK

Follow Verificado 2018 online, on Facebook and on Twitter.

Tom Trewinnard contributed (a lot) to this post.

Innovation through iteration was originally published in Pop-Up Newsroom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Candidates running for office in 2018 will have virtually every aspect of their campaign captured by digital devices, much of it being uploaded and shared to platforms. It won’t just be their public campaign rallies but any speech given in a living room, community center or church. Every claim, position statement, gaffe, or misstep has the potential to be caught for both accountability and posterity during the democratic process.

CAMPAIGN:18 exists to change the way that campaigns are reported by capturing, indexing, transcribing, fact-checking and verifying every review-worthy claim or action of the candidates running for office. This will hold candidates accountable as they will be fact-checked against their very own speeches, statements, remarks and actions.

The legacy of this project will be a campaign coverage playbook combining technology and editorial innovation that will be replicated and iterated globally.

THE TIME IS RIGHT

Understanding that elections are increasingly susceptible to narratives created and amplified through social media and micro-targeted through ad-tech, there is pressing need for serious efforts to catalogue, verify, and fact-check video and audio from the campaign trail. Smartphone penetration rates and public social shares of this content creates the potential to exhaustively collect this content for the first time.

CAMPAIGN:18 will forward the innovations in election monitoring that were developed during US presidential elections in 2016 and then refined in Kenya, Hong Kong, France and the UK in 2017.

CONCEPT FRAMING

To fact-check candidates against themselves and hold them truly accountable we will combine technological and editorial innovation with collaborative journalism to:

• Build social media monitoring systems and audience participation programs to find, source and receive submissions of user-generated video, photos and accounts from across the entire campaign trail of every candidate. By actively encouraging the capture of speeches big and small through people on the ground and feeds from traditional media we will have the most complete record of a candidate’s remarks ever made. This will also be a new model for engaging a diverse community in the reporting, verification and fact-checking process.
• Issue tag, timestamp, geolocate, and index this content to each candidate, enabling a view of how consistent a candidate remains on a single issue or position.
• Work closely with our technology partners to build bespoke software, algorithms and ontologies to meet specific needs of journalists and researchers.
• Create an open, searchable, API accessible claims database (CDB) for every candidate, logging every speech and appearance into a database that will be open to all participating project partners, opening up multiple ways this data may be analysed and reported.
• Link the transcriptions of claims in the CDB to an archive of the video, audio, and photographic records they are sourced from, so that this multimedia may easily accessed and used as part of the reporting process of all participating organisations.

CREATING A PROPRIETARY TECHNOLOGY STACK FOR CAMPAIGN COVERAGE

We plan to engage with our technology partners to create new, fit-for-purpose technologies that will allow this project to grow for every future election, adapting to trends and technical capability.

We hope to focus technical innovation on these initial core areas:

• To develop an essential tool for text and multimedia claims verification and workflow management for structured data around election campaigns and misinformation.
• To create monitoring and logging tools with speech to text transcription that can be used to capture campaign data for fast analysis and reporting.
• To work with partners to develop and refine software, algorithms, ontologies and AI applications that will allow projects like this to be replicated far more easily in the future.
• To create tools and communication workflows that help facilitate collaborative journalism projects on this scale.

SCALING IT UP

This project will be piloted in the 2018 US Midterm Elections in preparation for a larger implementation for the 2020 cycle.

We are working to take this model to European, African, Latin American, and Pacific Asian elections scheduled for 2018–19, having a playbook and supporting technologies that local partners can use and innovate from, allows this work to serve equally valuable reporting and public service interests globally.

This concept can easily be applied beyond election cycles to other news coverage of breaking events.

FUNDING AND PARTICIPATION

A project of this scope and social impact is likely to draw a wide range of partners and at the outset we embrace a wide model for partner inclusion in project design and implementation; the more newsrooms and technologists that join us, the greater the project’s impact..

If you like the idea of capturing and verifying election promises and statements through the many months leading up to these critical midterm elections taking place during this ideologically divisive moment in US politics, then we welcome your participation and/or your support. Please reach out to us at campaign18@popupnewsroom.eu or via https://popup.news/campaign18/

These organizations have already agreed to join us in designing, building, and delivering on this ambitious project:

CAMPAIGN:18 was originally published in Pop-Up Newsroom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.