The Examiner chain is hoping to beef up its online side by paying bloggers based on the number of page views. Gawker Media, whose sites include the Silicon Valley gossip site ValleyWag.com, has been paying its writers this way for years. Gawker took delight in reporting that the Examiner has now borrowed its concept:

“The wee free newspapers of nutty Christian entrepreneur Philip Anschutz (the DC, Baltimore, and San Francisco Examiners) have announced an exciting new method of paying content-providers: based on the page views those content-providers accumulate!

“The Examiner umbrella brand has launched what looks like 1,000 new blogs based on every possible topic one could blog about (with plenty of overlap), written by, who knows, hobos and bored high school students, and all of them will be paid between $2.50 and $10 for every 1,000 views they attract to their pages.”

Gawker says the Examiner plans to launch a promotional campaign for new bloggers (who will be called “examiners”) in the next week or so.