It took awhile, but I finally got the executive editors of both the St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald to talk a bit about their latest venture, a combined statehouse bureau in Tallahassee.

Times executive editor Neil Brown said the arrangement has something of a precedent: a news-sharing arrangement between the two papers in the late '70s, in which they had separate staffs, but shared stories.

Herald executive editor Anders Gyllenhaal originally suggested the new team-up, envisioning a way the two papers could get more journalistic return on their current staffing levels, Brown said. Under this new bureau system, both papers won't have to cover the same stories -- theoretically getting more "spread" from the same personnel.

The biggest hurdle: Who would be in charge? Plans are for the two papers' current bureau chiefs -- Steve Bousquet at the Times and Mary Ellen Klas at the Herald -- to switch off leading the office in three-month periods. Whoever leads the bureau will have to juggle story ideas and needs with each paper's state editor; because so many newspapers have cut back on reporters, there's likely enough space in the Tallahassee press offices for the new group to move into a larger area without spending much money.

The Times boasts several Herald alums, including Bousquet and Brown, so "we found a compatibility journalistically," Brown said. Gyllenhaal warned against confusing this arrangement with the Herald's agreement to share certain kinds of news with the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and the Palm Beach Post. Both men insisted the journalistic upside outweighed any concerns about a single voice dominating state political coverage.

Both men also agreed that setting aside their own competitive instincts was key -- since the two papers don't compete much for advertising, any competition "is mostly about us, not the reader," Brown said.   

So, who gets to run the bureau first? "I think we'll flip a coin," Gyllenhaal said.

I wasn't sure if he was joking.

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