Last summer, bright blue billboards proclaimed AnnArbor. com the “#1 local newspaper site in America.” Yet in September the website’s owners, the Newhouse family, abandoned the four-year-old brand and its acorn logo. Articles by Ann Arbor-based journalists are again being posted to Newhouse’s statewide site, MLive. com–just as they were before AnnArbor. com launched in 2009. The newspaper, too, has been “rebranded” into the past. It is once again called the Ann Arbor News–though it is still published only twice a week, and in much smaller numbers than the bygone daily.

So what happened? Why did AnnArbor. com, launched with a huge marketing budget and hopes that it would be a model for the entire Newhouse chain, fail as a brand and as a business?

In a press release, MLive president Dan Gaydou and former Ann Arbor publisher Laurel Champion–now general manager for southeast Michigan–insisted that “AnnArbor. com was a bold business move that’s been a huge success.” Yet according to comScore Media Metrix data, the site’s unique visitor count dropped in several months of 2013–in May, AnnArbor. com drew 388,000 unique visitors, compared to 538,000 in May 2012. And on close examination, the billboards’ “largest” claim turns out to have been deceptive. A tiny footnote revealed that it reflected the combined local readership of AnnArbor. com and MLive.

Print circulation, meanwhile, fell off a cliff. In a September 2007 audit of the Ann Arbor News, paid Sunday circulation was 58,416. In March of 2013, AnnArbor. com’s Sunday sales were just 30,998. Thursday circulation, 26,648, was even lower.

And the local newsroom staff has continued to shrink. The old News employed close to 90 journalists a decade ago. AnnArbor. com launched with thirty-five, then laid off a dozen people in 2011. An online directory currently lists twenty-three newsroom and community staffers.

Though Newhouse bosses boasted of AnnArbor. com’s success in engaging online readers, there were plenty of dissenters. “I found them to be unreadable,” said Paul Courant, former U-M provost and dean of libraries. “There just wasn’t any there there.”

Matt Hampel, who helps edit ArborWiki. org, didn’t like the design. “The site always felt cluttered and, to be frank, cheap,” he says. “The garish ads distracted from the content of the site.” And though Newhouse assumed the well-wired Ann Arbor was the perfect place for a largely online product, twenty-something Hampel is one of many who still prefer ink on paper.

“I have way too many digital devices, but I still get the {New York} Times in paper every morning,” he says. “Why? Because I discover more stories that I never notice online. Ann Arbor is highly connected, but there still are many people who would prefer to consume the paper product–or even a mobile-optimized website, which the .com never built.”

It can’t have helped that the initial plans for AnnArbor. com were hatched in New York City in a series of meetings with Jeff Jarvis, a consultant who helped launch MLive in 1996. Jarvis and Steve Newhouse, a third-generation family member, decided to kill the daily Ann Arbor News in a series of meetings in midtown Manhattan, without discussing their plans with anyone locally.

At the time, Jarvis told the Observer that he thought “Ann Arbor can be a model for the wired city”–a prospect he found “very exciting.” In a September email, the consultant said he remains proud of AnnArbor. com’s role in digital communications and community engagement. “Yes, I’m disappointed it is no longer a stand-alone enterprise. Though I’m not privy to the decision-making process at MLive.com, I of course understand their desire to consolidate brands and operations. But I will still point to AnnArbor. com as a model in having the courage to drive to the future rather than merely protecting the past.”

That future, though, now will look much more like the past. MLive is seventeen years old, and the News, through its predecessors, dates back to 1835.