Yesterday’s announcement of the end of The Ann Arbor News is yet another dark cloud in the ever-worsening landscape of print journalism in this country.

All across the country, newspapers are switching to an online format, cutting down on staff and content, filing for bankruptcy and even going under. Though 15,704 people lost a job at a newspaper in 2008, and over 6,000 have already lost their jobs this year, according to Paper Cuts, a website that tracks layoffs, buyouts and news in the U.S. newspaper industry, some local experts have begun to speculate that the Ann Arbor’s tech-savvy community could make for a smooth transition to a strictly online news outlet.

“Many people think that we’re experiencing a slow but quickening death spiral of the newspaper industry,” said Michael Traugott, chair of the University’s Communications Department, in an interview yesterday.

“So who is going to keep an eye from a news perspective on developers, the University of Michigan, certain kinds of businesses as well as the political machinery in local government?” he said.

Dave Askins, editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle, a local, online news source that was launched last year, declined to speculate about whether the new AnnArbor.com will provide people with a replacement they could be satisfied with. Though he did say that Ann Arbor was “more likely to embrace an online publication than other communities.”

He said that people typically cite interactivity, spontaneity and publishing “as it happens” as the advantages of online news sources.

“That is by no means our strength,” he said.

For Askins, the freedom to write as much as necessary and include as much detail and thoroughness as possible sets online publishing apart from print, where there are limits on paper space.

“It’s the vertical scroll bar we take advantage of,” he said.

Whether AnnArbor.com will share this philosophy is unknown.

“The important thing is that you have a news organization that has sustainable economics to it so that it exists,” Askins said.

Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje said that although he was confident local news coverage would continue without The Ann Arbor News, he said “it does mean the loss of another way to get info out to the public.”

“It's uncharted territory,” Hieftje said of the loss. “But there’s still going to be news coverage."

Indeed, many worry that for newspapers with extensive coverage of local news, moving to the Internet will have negative consequences. Primarily, there is concern that newspapers will lose the credibility that sustains their traditional position as a necessary check on institutions — a protector of democracy.

Traditional newspapers, like The Ann Arbor News, have been forced to compete with an explosion of online content, and as a result they’re suffering from declining subscriptions and advertising revenue. These factors is the crushing economic crisis making consumers think twice about buying something they can get online for free.

The Ann Arbor News is not the first paper to go through this transition.