Look out, Chronicle sports writers -- your bosses seem to think a bunch of fans can do just as good a job of covering sports as you can, for a fraction of the price. San Francisco Business Times reports that Hearst, owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, just cut a with "citizen sportswriters" business Bleacher Report (“the world’s largest publisher of exclusively fan-generated sports reporting”) to farm out some of the items in its sports section.

This is like, say, a cross between The Examiners, at Examiner.com (not to be confused with the reporters who work for the Examiner franchise of newspapers) and asking a bunch of SFGate commenters to write the news. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but, well, there you have it.

SF Biz Times notes:

The "co-branded" sports news will appear on the Chronicle’s SFGate web site, along with the web sites of the Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News and the SeattlePI.com web site, which doesn’t have a print newspaper associated with it. The Seattle site is the rump news organization leftover from the defunct Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, closed by Hearst in March 2009.

No word yet on what the financial details were, but we're guessing it was pretty neat.

Sources tell us that some of the Chronicle's top Sports section talent make in excess of $150K a year. Which is good, since, according to some sports fans, they have some decent scribes over at Fourth and Mission. But we wonder how many Bleacher reports you can get for $150K? We bet it's a lot.