When my wife Laura started Homicide Watch DC, she spent a day in DC Superior Court listening to the regular rituals of cases in progress – status hearings, presentments and arraignments, jury selection if anything had gotten that far, though it rarely does.

At some point, an attorney asked about what she was doing, and she explained the project: She was going to cover every murder in the nation’s capital, from the initial crime report to conviction and sentencing. In a city that has always had too many homicides and almost always more than 100 per year, this seemed like a radical idea, both in the courts and in the city’s newsrooms. But this attorney was happy to see someone try, because what happens in courtrooms matters to more people than most newsrooms understand.

“There is a Pulitzer to be won in this courthouse every single day,” he told her. The obvious lesson from this was that we were onto uncovered territory, a blue ocean where no one else would see the stories Laura was seeing. And this was true.

A decade after the end of Homicide Watch DC, I’ve started to see another piece of advice in what that lawyer said.

You need to be able to come back tomorrow.

Journalism grinds people down. I started my first reporting job 20 years ago this summer, in August of 2004. There aren’t many people I worked with then who are still in this business.

My first editor gave me a little speech about sea turtles: In any clutch of eggs, some won’t hatch, a few hatchlings will be eaten on the way to the water, more soon after. A couple might grow to adulthood. It’s not an uplifting metaphor, and it’s no way to run an industry.

I’m writing this a couple days after an election that has left everyone I know exhausted. We’re four years removed from the worst pandemic in a century, and there are sure to be hard years ahead.

Most of my job now is building tools for other journalists, and I think a big part of what that job needs to be is making sure the people I work with can come back tomorrow. From our content management systems to our editorial calendars to our onboarding habits, sustainability and resiliance need to be central to what we do.

I’ve heard versions of this from fitness and jiu jitsu coaches I respect, too: Train today in a way that lets you train tomorrow. Rob Biernacki said it best on a recent podcast: “We’re not fighting each other. We’re fighting injuries.” No one gets better if people are getting hurt by the process.

There are going to be hard days. I don’t have answers for everything, or most things. All I can say for sure is that there is work to be done, in places we can’t see if we’re not there to look.

Come back tomorrow.