To our readers:

It seems like a long time ago, and it seems like yesterday.

Two years ago this weekend, AnnArbor.com sprang to life as a new media company devoted to sustaining local journalism in the online age.

As we celebrate our second anniversary, we want to report to you the encouraging progress we continue to make. Even more importantly, we want to thank you for the support, encouragement and very candid feedback you have given us as we continue our rapid evolution.

From the beginning, we have promised that everything we do would be guided by feedback from the community, and we continue to get that input in a variety of ways, whether from comments posted on our website, from continual interaction with readers and businesses, or from the openness of such avenues as inviting posts on our Community Wall and having community members serve on our Editorial Board.

Coverage of the Borders liquidation, the Art Fair and other local stories brought nearly 300,000 unique visitors to AnnArbor.com last week.

Angela J. Cesere | AnnArbor.com

Earlier this year, the journalists on our staff won 13 awards in the Michigan Associated Press newswriting contest, more than any other newspaper of our circulation size. That’s one measure of how committed we are to serious journalism. But the best reflection of our commitment is the coverage we provide day in and day out and the audience that comes to read it.

This past week was a prime example of that, as readers consumed our coverage of the Borders liquidation, the Art Fair, the heat wave, the series of assaults on women in Ann Arbor and layoffs at Eastern Michigan University, among other important stories.

A year ago at this time, we reported on the substantial and growing audience that we had built around our news coverage. Back then, we told you that our site traffic had grown from an average of 115,000 unique visitors a week in August 2009 to a little more than 200,000 a week in July 2010. This past week, we saw close to 300,000 unique visitors.

In two short years, we have become the primary source of local news and information in this community and we rank among the top news sites nationally for local market reach in conjunction with MLive, according to Media Audit, a company that measures media readership across the country.

Research conducted by Great Lakes Marketing also has told us that AnnArbor.com is mentioned more than any other source when people are asked where they go most often for news and information about Ann Arbor. About 40 percent of residents in Washtenaw County report that they visited AnnArbor.com “today or yesterday.’’

While we are an online-first company, we also serve the community with a newspaper published twice a week, and we are grateful for the support that our print subscribers continue to give us. Since last fall, our print circulation has remained quite stable.

A large and loyal audience online and in print has allowed us to continue to build our business, with the launch over the past year of new advertising platforms that have been well-received by both our readers and local businesses.

We are pleased and grateful for the way that the community is engaging with these new approaches. Perhaps you have used our daily “Real Deal’’ to snag a great bargain from one of our local businesses. Maybe you have voted for your favorite pizza place or coffee shop or grocery story through our weekly “BestOf’’ contests. Perhaps you’ve surfed for employment opportunities on our new Jobs Connection page.

Through the introduction of these and other new features, along with the continued success we see with the “Deal’’ and “Partner’’ messages that have been at the core of our business model since launch, we have created a sustainable business model for the future.

At AnnArbor.com, our evolution continues to be constant and fast-paced. Based on reader feedback and usability studies, we recently launched some subtle but important changes to our homepage, designed to improve how we present news and advertising in our Top Stories module, in the river of news that flows through our homepage throughout the day, and in our right rail. The early indications are that these changes have significantly improved engagement with both content and advertising.

Coming in August, we are excited to introduce a new Food and Grocery platform that will take the audience and content we’ve already built around the local food scene and combine it with daily specials from local grocers. As we’ve talked with people in the community about this concept, we’ve gotten strong positive feedback. To help launch this new concept, we’re planning a $30,000 grocery giveaway that will include weekly prizes of gift certificates from participating grocers and a grand prize of “groceries for a year’’ (valued at $10,000) to be awarded in December.

We’re working on many other improvements as well, including a new photo gallery and an overhaul of our topic pages devoted to Sports and University of Michigan football and basketball.

The last two years have been a great learning experience for us. Launching a new company in this economy and in this industry is a daunting challenge, but we’ve never hesitated to try new things -- or to do less or more of those things based on the response of our audience.

Our commitment from day one was to be of, by and for the community. Throughout our journey, what the community has told us is that it wants us to succeed. In that spirit, our readers have given us encouragement and at the same time, have challenged us — sometimes quite bluntly — to improve. We have listened and we have responded, letting our evolution be shaped by what creates real value for readers and business partners, and that will continue to be true going forward.

We have great ambitions for where we want to be next year at this time, and look forward to the progress that we anticipate in the next 12 months. But today, we pause to reflect on how far the community has helped to bring us so far.

We thank each and every one of you for the support you have given this endeavor. We thank our business partners, who face all of the same challenges we do, and who have committed to be part of our success, just as we have committed to be part of theirs. We also deeply thank our employees, whose talent, hard work and passion for what we do is such an important ingredient in our success so far.

Please accept our gratitude, and our promise that we will constantly put the community at the center of everything we do in the next year as we continue to commit ourselves to local journalism and a new business model to sustain it.

Sincerely,

Matt Kraner, President and CEO

Laurel Champion, Executive Vice President

Tony Dearing, Chief Content Officer