1. Humans are bad at seeing trends. We focus on anecdotes and tend to overvalue outlyers. We look for odd cases instead of what's normal. Your eyes will deceive you; don't trust them. CAR reporters tend to be better at handling this, so I want to extract the tools used for investigative projects and apply them to daily reporting.

2. It's hard to see the whole story. Problems like crime, climate change or economics don't benefit from incremental updates--indeed, they can add to confusion--until you know the big picture. This is where better tools can help, like a database that captures the information reporters collect in the course of writing stories.

3. It's hard to know what matters. Don't commit to an information structure until you know what you're dealing with, and even then, be prepared to change. If your framework doesn't match reality, change your framework. This is in the weeds a bit, but it's important to deal with, since structures enforce a certain rigidity.

4. Information gets lost. Text is a lossy medium. Video and audio are worse. We gather an enormous amount of information in the course of reporting, but most of it gets thrown away. Use every part of the pig. Never lose information.

5. When it comes to knowing the state of the world, I shouldn't have to guess. News stories are focused on what's new, what's changed, but most of what we know about our subject matter hasn't changed. Old information gets pushed to the bottom of stories, rewritten and recycled. Don't repeat yourself. The sidebar on FiveThirtyEight is a great example of this.

6. Getting to 100 percent. Our goal with Homicide Watch DC was to cover every homicide, crime to conviction. That meant focusing on one type of crime, in one place, to the exclusing of everything else. Sometimes it meant throwing out a lot of traditions that get justified as "what reporters do," like going to crime scenes and filing FOIAs. Instead, we focused on gathering data ourselves and building a structure around court reporting.