By DAGNY SALAS

In Friday’s edition of The Miami Herald, a reader may have come across Connie Ogle’s scathing review of “Bride Wars,” a movie centered on two best friends’ competing nuptials.

Should that reader have opened the pages of Friday’s Sun Sentinel, he would have found the same review.

Not long ago, finding the same story in two different publications might have been called plagiarism. Now, in the fiercely competitive South Florida news media market, it’s called financial common sense.

With the news industry facing a worsening economic climate, South Florida’s three largest newspapers, The Miami Herald, the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and The Palm Beach Post, are sharing stories, primarily about crime, community issues and other municipal topics.

The papers began sharing content last September on a three-month trial basis. Executives were so pleased with the results and cost savings that they decided to extend the experiment to a year.

Those in charge are also considering expanding the kinds of stories they share, said Earl Maucker, editor of the Sun Sentinel.

“We are very happy and think we can go further with it because it demonstrates we can do more,” Maucker said Friday.

In December, the three newspapers also announced a partnership with Florida International University in which journalism students will create a local wire service, from which the papers can cherry-pick content, said Allan Richards, associate dean of FIU’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The alliance gives the papers another way to deepen local coverage and provide students professional experience, Richards said.

The decision to allow stories to appear in three neighboring newspapers might seem sacrilegious to traditionalists, particularly in a region where there have long been intense rivalries. But the move is part of a slowly growing trend, said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit training and research organization for journalists.

In November, The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram announced a similar content-sharing agreement, and in December, The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun agreed to publish regional and international stories in each other’s editions.

The pooling of resources is a reflection of the challenges the industry faces, Edmonds said.

“I think newspapers are looking for what they can do to bring down costs since ad revenue keeps falling,” Edmonds said. “People can’t afford to make competition a priority with the economic pressure so intense.”

Another reason for these types of partnerships is the fragmentation of the audience for news as the Internet provides more ways to get information, said Joe Strupp, senior editor at Editor & Publisher.

With the Internet providing infinite ways to deliver the news quickly, the wall among news outlets is eroding, making partnerships a natural progression, Strupp said.

In South Florida, one of the biggest benefits of sharing stories has been the ability to shift resources to more ambitious projects, said Anders Gyllenhaal, the executive editor of The Miami Herald.

“With three papers working together to share routine coverage — things that don’t define the papers but are inside and basic content — there’s more time for franchise elements,” Gyllenhaal said.

Despite the successes, getting used to treating other local papers as resources rather than competitors has taken some adjusting, said Paul Blythe, a news editor at The Palm Beach Post.

When The Post beat the Sun Sentinel on a story about a corruption investigation involving a Palm Beach County commissioner last September, Blythe said several staffers still felt the satisfaction of scoring a journalistic coup.

But the opportunity to experiment with ways of delivering the news trumps any lingering reluctance, Maucker, the Sun Sentinel’s editor, said.

“Some reporters view it as a slippery slope,” Maucker said, “but we look at it as, we can better deploy resources. We need to become more creative because we can’t rob the reader. This is one way to do it.”