A Richmond publisher’s experiment in public service is ending — maybe.

City Edition, Richmond’s three-year-old “solution-centered” weekly community newspaper, announced in its final edition July 9 that it will cease publication.

“Unfortunately, it’s true,” says Turia Pope, the paper’s managing editor, reached last week while she was attending to details of the paper’s last issue.

Since 2005, City Edition has distributed more than a million papers within Richmond city limits, filling what founding editor Nicole Anderson Ellis calls “a hole in Richmond for local civic news.”

The paper set out to provide what other community weeklies such as the Henrico Citizen, Chesterfield Observer and Hanover Herald-Progress offer: detailed coverage of local issues with a focus on the human element that sometimes is lost in translation for larger, daily papers.

But that news hole now will go unfilled — at least for a while, says Anderson Ellis, who stepped down as editor about a year after the paper started, following the birth of her first child. In the wake of the paper’s demise, she may well be stepping up again to aid in its possible resurrection.

“No one is happy to see City Edition retired, but this sort of decision is part of the business — part of any business,” Anderson Ellis says. “I don’t think this is the end of City Edition. Right now the talk is of a sale to another publisher — soon, I hope.”

Officials with R.L Kent Publishing Co. Inc., which owns City Edition, were unavailable for comment.