A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

short when we get things wrong…We have done things that would have been
impossible without them.” 121
Partnering with Frenemies
The most substantial partnership underway at The Miami Herald has unfolded 500
miles northwest of the home office, at the paper’s state capital bureau in Tallahassee.
When The Herald and The St. Petersburg Times first explored the idea of combining
their Tallahassee bureaus, some reporters rejected the idea as “really stupid—a way of
eliminating the only real competition we had in Tallahassee,” said Steve Bousquet.
Bousquet, who was state capital bureau chief for The Times and now shares the title for
the combined bureau with the Herald’s Mary Ellen Klas. 122
The question that he said was bugging reporters skeptical of the proposed alliance:
“What incentive would we have to keep doing really good stuff?”
Bousquet’s response—that competition “comes from the soul of the reporter” as
opposed to competition—may or may not have convinced his colleagues.
But the stories produced by the combined bureaus in their first year—including an
ongoing investigation of the House speaker who parlayed his position into a high‐
paying job 123 and abuse of government travel funds by state officials 124 —probably has.
“This was not about saving money,” Gyllenhaal told me in a telephone conversation
about the combined bureaus, which just completed their first year together. “The idea
was to create more time to do enterprise stuff.” 125 In an agreement signed by both
Gyllenhaal and St. Petersburg Times executive editor Neil Brown, the papers pledge to
maintain the current combined staffing (three Times reporters and two from The Herald)
for the life of the deal.
Bousquet said in a telephone interview that delivering the bureau’s stories to the
combined audiences of the state’s two largest papers has changed the power equation
for journalists in Tallahassee.
“Before, if a story wasn’t picked up by other papers, politicians were able to
marginalize the story or the reporter,” Bousquet said in a telephone interview. “Now
we’re hitting the state’s two biggest media markets with the story and it’s getting picked
up by TV and bloggers and public radio (in both markets).”
40