A team works best when individual members respect the goals and needs of the team and when the team respects the goals, aspirations and individuality of team members.

Discuss coverage plans

• Understand your role. You probably have a brief job description. You might have expanded on that some yourself and/or within your team. Clarify your role further, in writing and in discussions with your team leader and the team as a whole. What routine meetings and events should you plan to cover? What periodic or annual events should you plan to cover (both specific events and types of events)? What sorts of events would you normally not cover but be responsible for monitoring for occasional story possibilities? What sorts of agencies or institutions, public and private, will you deal with regularly? What are likely unofficial and non-institutional sources of news on your beat? Who are the unofficial catalysts and connectors who will help you learn and cover your beat? What issues and topics will you cover regularly? How much of your work should be daily coverage? How much short-term enterprise? How much of your work should be long-term enterprise?
• Understand teammates' roles. Share job descriptions with your teammates and team leaders. They might suggest something you should take into account in your job description. Do their expectations of your job match your plans? If not, discuss how to adjust expectations. Do your expectations of their jobs match their plans? Remember that your job description and theirs are plans, not straitjackets. The plans will change as you learn more about your job, as you work with teammates and as developments in the community and the newsroom prompt changes.
• Identify overlap. Identify areas where your beat might overlap with other team members or with other reporters on other teams. What are stories that you both might pursue?
• Address overlap. Before actual stories present conflicts, discuss with other team members and with team leaders how to handle possible overlaps. Does one reporter have primary responsibility and another has secondary responsibility? Or does each have primary responsibility in particular situations? Both reporters must commit to communicate about sources, story ideas and news developments. Discuss possible conflicts and possible opportunities for collaboration.
• Identify and address gaps. What agencies, institutions, areas, people or stories might not fall on anyone's beat as you have outlined them? Think especially about organizations or issues that are non-geographic or non-traditional. Think especially about people outside the community power structure. Discuss whether someone on the team should expand her beat to fill any gaps. Potential conflicts can also be potential gaps: Two reporters have potential responsibility in an area and each assumes the other will cover without confirming the assumption.

Learn about your team

• Know your teammates' abilities. Discuss with your colleagues the special skills you each have. What languages do various team members speak? How fluent are they? A reporter who wouldn't feel comfortable interviewing in a language still might be fluent enough to help a colleague ask a source on the phone if a family member speaks English. How adept are team members at Internet research? Using the Freedom of Information Act? Searching court records? Understanding tax issues? Understanding budgets? Understanding legal issues? Reading financial reports? Computer-assisted reporting?
• Know your teammates' interests and experience. Teammates can be a valuable resource to help you understand topics that arise as you work on stories. Learn who has a particular interest in a kind of music you don't follow or who belongs to a religious group you're unfamiliar with or who might have encountered a particular health problem. You can respect privacy within the team while still learning who can help you understand issues that might arise in your reporting.

Share as a team

• Share resources. Tell teammates about directories, reports, data bases and reference materials you have that may be helpful. Mark items with your name so they will return to you. Be considerate in borrowing from teammates. If they're around, ask permission, even if the person already has given general permission. If the person is not around, send an e-mail telling him what you have borrowed and when you expect to return it. Then make sure you return it. Set a computer reminder or mark your calendar with a reminder as soon as you borrow the item, so you don't forget to return it. Tell teammates about Web sites you find that might be helpful to other reporters. Tell teammates about valuable resources you find in our library, the public library or elsewhere in the community.
• Share ideas. Discuss how you plan to share story ideas and coverage suggestions. When is it appropriate to suggest something directly to another reporter? When should you suggest something to a team leader or the team at large? What's the best way to share ideas: face to face, personal e-mail, an e-mail discussion list, an idea file in your computer system that everyone has access to, team meetings?
  
  Share sources. You will encounter sources whose expertise extends beyond your beat. Tell other members of the team who might find that source helpful. Coordinate, though, so you're not constantly double-teaming the source.

Head off potential problems

• Consider the diversity of the team and the community. How well does your team reflect the community you cover? What parts of the community are not reflected on your team? What parts are over represented? What parts are under represented? What experiences do team members have outside work that add to your diversity? Discuss how to use the assets you have in writing about the community. Discuss how your diversity as a group will enhance your coverage of the community. Discuss how your lack of diversity as a group could limit your coverage of the community. What can you do to avoid potential gaps in your coverage?
• Discuss concerns openly. You need to find the right level of collaboration. Often teamwork will require reporters to work together on a story. Sometimes teamwork will require a reporter with less experience to work on a story with a veteran reporter. Sometimes the reporter with less experience will relish the chance to learn from the veteran. Sometimes the reporter with less experience will feel lost and unappreciated in the shadow of the veteran. Discuss this balance openly and candidly. Sometimes the veteran needs to take the lead because the story needs the experienced hand. Sometimes the veteran needs to step back and use the story as a chance for the other reporter to gain experience. Sometimes a younger reporter will have a skill the veteran lacks. Discuss openly the proper way to handle that situation. Acknowledge and discuss the awkwardness of the situation if it bothers either of you.
• Appreciate differences in style. Individual reporters have differences in work pace, work hours, productivity, competitiveness, neatness, habits, personal and professional values, sense of humor, attitude about work, attitude about your newspaper, attitude about the community, home situation, role in the newsroom and other issues and characteristics. Many of these differences make a newsroom a fun, stimulating place to work. Some of the differences irritate colleagues. Discuss the annoying differences candidly. You might learn a reasonable explanation that helps you understand and appreciate a colleague's style. Or you may become sensitive to how your style affects colleagues.
• Discuss how you cover for each other. Team members will be absent for extended periods for various reasons: vacation, illness, family leave, detachment for projects. How do you cover that reporter's responsibilities during the absence? Do reporters need to prepare contact lists and how-to instructions beyond the job description to help colleagues who might cover for them? Do you wait until you know of a pending absence to prepare such information or should every reporter prepare some information so it's available in an emergency?

Remember the reader

• The story is the tiebreaker. Where individual team members are both planning a story on a topic, the story is more important than individual egos in resolving differences. Who can get to the story to our readers quicker and better? Who has more background in this issue? Who can spend the time needed to do the story right? Sometimes the solution is collaboration. Sometimes the solution is deciding which reporter should do the story alone. Always the solution is deciding the best way to serve the reader.
• Focus on the reader. As you address team issues that seem like internal matters, consider what approaches will best serve the reader. If the easy solution internally doesn't serve the reader, then you have to make the sacrifices or work out your differences to follow an approach that's best for the reader.