Every morning we get together and look at the Reno Gazette-Journal. We talk about what we like and don’t like. It’s always interesting to hear and see what grabs our attention.

We divide up into two-person teams and talk about news judgment, design, reader engagement, cutlines and other elements. I think we all know that any of our papers and Web sites are just as apt to fall prey to the same pitfalls we point out every day.

The exercise is fun and informative. The staff at the paper does the same thing in their morning news meetings. I suggest we all take a little time every day to look deeper into our pubs, and from time to time find other papers to evaluate.

Later today we will have J. Ford Huffman, a design guru formerly with USA Today, evaluate a single edition of our papers. That should be a humbling experience for all of us.

More on that later.

A few notes from our morning drill with Deborah Gump:

• Cutlines should always add information to the story presented. They should not just restate information contained in the story.
• If you raise a question in a story, you'd better answer it, or explain why you can’t.
• Avoid jumping stories to a different section. It makes the reader work too hard. If the reader doesn’t want to work that hard, they will leave ... and maybe not come back.