Washington Post Food Editor Joe Yonan sent an e-mail to Northern Virginia magazine’s Warren Rojas yesterday with an emergency request: Would Rojas mind if Ezra Klein‘s new column on food politics runs under the same name as the magazine’s Gut Check blog?

It was an honorable move on Yonan’s part. It just came late in the game. By the time the two scribes connected yesterday, the Post‘s Food section had already gone to print with Klein’s Gut Check column in it. Yonan proceeded to do the right thing and offered to change the title after the fact.

Rojas didn’t think that was unnecessary.

“I didn’t make a stink because I didn’t make up the phrase,” Rojas told Y&H this afternoon. “I’m fairly confident that no one will confuse [Klein’s] academic style with our free-form blog.”

So how did the near-snafu occur?

The name of the column was submitted by a reader via an online contest, which drew hundreds of responses, Yonan wrote me via e-mail today. Yonan thought Gut Check “fit really well” with Klein’s concept; it just took some time to reach that conclusion.

“We were sifting through and tossing them around right up until deadline, and in that rush neglected to do our due diligence in the checking, which is how we ended up picking one that we later remembered was the same as warren’s fun blog,” Yonan writes.

Adds Yonan: “Since warren was so understanding about all this, no harm, no foul.”