Experts on Call: Infrastructuring Temporary Collaboration Spaces to Support Journalists

High-stakes events like the U.S. presidential election create intense, time-sensitive information demands. Journalists must verify and contextualize complex, decentralized processes—like state-specific election laws—under tight deadlines. Traditional expert sourcing often proves too slow, and with declining utility on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), quick access to trusted expertise remains a challenge. This study examines the Votebeat Expert Helpdesk, a real-time online collaboration space that connected journalists and experts during the 2024 election. Drawing on 21 interviews, we analyze the sociotechnical arrangements that enabled fast journalist–expert information exchange. Structural and maintenance choices—such as many-to-many access, clear rules, and routinized practices like tagging—supported the helpdesk under pressure and alleviated previously observed tensions, even as questions of sustainability and expert recognition persisted. Our findings suggest that temporary, high-intensity coordination infrastructures, when carefully structured and actively maintained, can support meaningful journalist–expert knowledge exchange during fast-moving, high-stakes public-interest moments that necessitate rapid response. This paper contributes to CSCW by empirically examining a novel artifact in real-world use and showing that infrastructuring in time-bound knowledge work depends not only on technical arrangement, but also on ongoing facilitation by knowledgeable organizers with the authority to maintain and adapt the system at speed. We close with design implications and future directions for extending this model to reporting beyond elections.