Small, his wife, and William H. Johnson invested in the newspaper in the late 1930s after the death of owner Frank Harris Hitchcock.

[1] However, those negotiations did not bear fruit, and on May 15, 2009, Gannett announced that the final print edition would appear the following day, and that the Citizen would thereafter be an Internet publication.

[6] Gannett's attempted sale and closure of the Citizen was the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and court action by Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard.

[citation needed] The successor site, TucsonCitizen.com, edited by the paper's former assistant city editor, Mark B. Evans, described itself as "a compendium of blogs .

The bloggers and citizen journalists here provide news, information, opinion, commentary and perspective on the issues, interests and events that affect daily life in the Old Pueblo."