Hearst Newspapers, owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, made a deal with “citizen sportswriters” business Bleacher Report for some of the news in its sports section.

    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.

    Bleacher Report was started a year ago by Dave Finocchio, Zander Freund, Bryan Goldberg and Dave Nemetz, who describe themselves as four “obsessed sports fans from the Bay Area.” Bleacher bills itself as “the world’s largest publisher of exclusively fan-generated sports reporting.”

    According to Bleacher Report, the special local sections of the newspapers will have original articles written by Bleacher contributors, and also “aggregated content from across the Web.”

    Chronicle Sports Editor Al Saracevic called the new reporting "a content feature we've added to the page on top of all the other stuff we do."

    Hearst Corp., based in New York, owns 15 daily newspapers and 38 weekies. It recently made a deal with YuMe Inc. in Redwood City to try and earn more advertising money from its magazine web sites.

   No prices or financial details were given about this deal.