Telegraph Creates Web Lab

Editorial, technical and commercial staff at the Daily Telegraph are joining forces in a bid to produce innovative ideas for online services.

Press Gazette reports that the national newspaper has just launched its Telegraph Labs initiative, which is designed to bring journalists together with IT specialists in a creative environment.

“It’s meant as a space where we take people on four to six-week cycles, take them out of their day jobs and get them to focus on a specific thing, and get them to rapidly create something that we can put out there very quickly,” explains Paul Cheesbrough, chief information officer at the Telegraph.

Cheesbrough hopes that the rotation system will enable as many staff members as possible to participate.

He adds: “We’re trying to move as many people as possible through to bring some of its culture back out onto the floor.”

The project already has some targets in sight, with the development of mobile internet services likely to figure among them.

Cheesbrough also states that the Lab hopes to come up with a new online product idea every month, although he stresses that success rates are not the be all and end all of the scheme.

“It is a safe place for people to work on things that might be high-risk and might be subject to failure, but that’s alright as long as we learn things out of it.”