That they will *always* want to be able to customize and prioritize things, but will quickly fall out of the habit of doing so.

Early mockups are key. Translating from developer to journalist speak can be problematic - if they can see conceptually what you're working on, they can understand and offer criticism before you're too deep into the project.

Explaining things in plain English and making deadlines. I worked with programmers for several years and the biggest problem was a lack of met deadlines from developers, which was usually due to bugs. Journalists work by deadlines and we expect others to do the same.

lavrusik: Often times, developers won't know how long something's going to take until we dig in. Most of the time, if you set a deadline ahead of time and want said deadline met, you're going to have to cut features.

Also, feature-creep has been a very real thing with every project I've done. You start off with a list of features that looks doable in a month, but a week before launch (because nobody looks at anything until at least that close to launch, and usually much later), suddenly there's a list of tweaks, adjustments and new directions that push the deadline back.

In other words, you generally have two choices: make the deadline, but cut features or miss the deadline, but get all the features you want.

Programers like data. Traditionally, journalists like stories. I often find that the two groups speak past each other because they fundamentally value different things.