For about a week now, we've participated in a story-sharing system with the other morning daily newspapers in Maine.

Last Wednesday's newspaper provided a strong example of what this partnership can yield for our readers: We featured five stories from newspapers outside our market – including a Page A1 offering.

All those stories were published "on cycle," which means that our readers saw them the same day as did readers in Bangor and Lewiston, where the stories originated.

The news, in other words, wasn't delayed. It didn't need to pass through the repackaging process of the Associated Press, which is the traditional method for receiving content from other newspapers. Each day, the AP takes stories from members' newspapers and Web sites. The wire service rewrites the stories – sometimes a lot, sometimes not much at all – affixes the "AP" moniker to each and distributes the collected content around the country and sometimes the globe. Other newspapers that belong to the AP can use these stories – usually a day after their initial publication.

After years of this practice, Maine editors decided to develop their own story-sharing system. By offering stories in real time, on deadline, we can deliver news more immediately and urgently to our readers. And we can make it clear to our readers where that news came from – by naming the writer and the newspaper. There is far more transparency and accountability in this process.

Still, if you are looking at journalism through the prism of, say, 1977, when I graduated from j-school, the arrangement sounds revolutionary, completely counter to the concept of newspaper competition and rivalry. What kind of editor would partner with competitors? Why would a newsroom engage in this sort of collaboration? What do we stand to gain?

If, however, the partnership is examined in the current context of media, it is far from radical.

Appropriate is more like it. And, given all the concerns about the health of American journalism, kind of obvious, too.

Some background: As a Blethen newspaper, we have always shared breaking news – stories, features, photos and graphics – with our two sister papers in Central Maine – the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel. We have used the descriptive "Blethen Maine News Service" atop such shared content.

But last Monday, we embarked on a broader partnership that added the Lewiston Sun Journal and the Bangor Daily News to that story-sharing system.

Some general guidelines: Each paper would offer three to four stories and photos each day, of its own choosing. Each newsroom decides what it wants to share. If a story or photo were picked up for publication, the journalist's byline would be featured along with the name of the newspaper. Credit is given where credit is due.

To kick off this partnership, all five newspapers published a story Saturday, Sept. 20, detailing the whys of this arrangement.

Today I want to delve a bit deeper into the purpose of this partnership – and explain why its existence may be the best thing for both readers and member newspapers.

Let me say that when the Bangor and Lewiston editors broached this idea with me years ago, I was very hesitant. At that time, I considered myself a traditional journalist. I didn't understand what our newspaper, the largest in the state, would get from this agreement. So I respectfully declined.

A lot has happened in the intervening years.

Newspapers have seen their circulations contract, even as their Web audiences have grown.

Our competitors are no longer each other. Today we compete much more with broadcast and with non-journalistic content-aggregators like Google and Yahoo, which "scrape" news stories from our sites and others around the world, and serve them up freely.

Readers have different expectations about journalism. They want the...