TusconCitizen.com, the online only version of the former print paper, will be fashioning itself after the Huffington Post, former city editor and now co-head of the online edition Mark Evans wrote this week.

The current site still reflects the paper’s metro daily orientation. “That’s over,” Evan wrote on the site’s blog. The new site will be a “more user-friendly site created to reflect the fast-paced, edgy nature of the Internet age.”

About the HuffPo model: “Don’t jump to conclusions about political bent, it’s the way the Huffpo site operates, not what’s on it that I’m talking about,” he wrote.

That is: “a collection of blogs and bloggers who post news, information, opinion and more on the site everyday.”

Evans acknowledged that these bloggers would not get paid, at least at first. “Our idea is to offer them the economy and power of scale. To bring them in under the TucsonCitizen.com’s big tent where the traffic for each benefits the other.” Down the road “a piece of revenue action” might be considered.

Evans also pledged to help bloggers “podcast, vodcast, live stream, create interactive graphics, find and use government data and much more.”

To jumpstart the new site, Evans is in the planning stages for a Tuscon bloggers convention. Oh, yes…”I have no budget for this yet, but I’m working on it, he admitted.