When The Ann Arbor News announced March 23 it was closing after 174 years, it left local readers at a loss for where to turn to for city news.

But never fear, the News’s upper echelon declared. Ann Arbor’s only daily wasn’t really dying — it was being reborn as AnnArbor.com, a web-based media company that would be a pioneer in the news industry’s inevitable turn to paperless production.

It was a bold plan, one that tried to find a silver lining in the otherwise consistent doom and gloom of faltering newspapers across the country. True, Ann Arbor is so far the largest city to lose its only newspaper. But perhaps also true is the fact that the publication’s transition to something like AnnArbor.com was bound to happen eventually anyway. And in a brave new world of web-based news outlets, a head start in mastering the market could only help.

But as a business, the road to AnnArbor.com’s prosperity is laden with obstacles. The website not only has to win former News readers over to a new format but also has to solve the riddle of how to finance a company almost exclusively through online ad revenue.

Since making the transition July 23 from The Ann Arbor News to AnnArbor.com, questions press the publication: how well is Ann Arbor’s new news source serving the community? Could it stand to do it better than its predecessor? And when AnnArbor.com does get it right, will former News readers appreciate it?

What the News was not

The Ann Arbor News and the majority of its readers were not the most agreeable of bedfellows. The News’s conservative editorial board — which endorsed George Bush in 2000 and 2004 — alienated the liberal epicenter it wrote for. In a large way, confrontational conservatism in the face of local values helped to put the last nail in the News’s coffin.

But politics aside, Ann Arbor still valued its local daily as any medium-sized city with a high level of community involvement would.

Karin Aarrak, an Ann Arbor resident of 35 years and a long-time News subscriber, was disappointed by the News’ closing and didn’t understand why it had to happen.

Former subscribers like Aarrak may miss the thud of the News landing on their doorstep each evening. But when it comes to accessing articles around the clock online, the replacement of mlive.com, the News’s former website, is nothing to cry over.

AnnArbor.com currently posts articles on mlive.com as well, which undoubtedly helped direct old readers to the new site.

But the host site for Michigan-based Booth Newspapers, mlive.com is an online news source that might actually detracted from publications’ accessibility. It is ugly, cluttered and confusing. Its search engine often redirects News readers to articles from other newspapers that are years old. The current mlive.com has gotten a face-lift, but the same problems with searching and finding articles persist.

The face of AnnArbor.com

It may seem suspect that the company that owned The Ann Arbor News — Booth Newspapers’ parent company, Advance Publications — would choose to stage an experiment in Internet-only journalism. But they have, and AnnArbor.com is it.

AnnArbor.com hasn’t completely abandoned print. It still publishes a print version (with the awkward masthead “Ann Arbor.com”) available to purchase Thursdays and Sundays. But the publication’s hopeful breadwinner is its website.

According to Tony Dearing, the chief content officer of AnnArbor.com, the purpose of the site is to offer hyper-local news that will present that news in a variety of different mediums.

AnnArbor.com is different from the standard newspaper website, Dearing said, because it provides readers with tools to access news coverage in ways that traditional journalism has shunned in the past. The site features articles, blog posts, videos and more from AnnArbor.com’s staff, community bloggers and even The Michigan Daily.

As unnatural as it may seem for two competing news outlets, the Daily and AnnArbor.com have made a content sharing agreement through which the publications will link to selected articles from the other publication to offer more to their web readers.

It’s one more unconventional step in many that AnnArbor.com has taken to deliver the news. The site pushes its top local stories every morning to those signed up to receive the digital newsletter. Viewers can browse posts like local concert reviews complete with MP3 links in the site’s entertainment section, The Deuce, or skim through a photo slideshow of the most unique storefronts in the city.

“We want to be people’s source for news and we are as committed to news as we ever have been,” Dearing said.