The internet pioneer, which remains one of the best known brands online, will bring news, blogs and video content together to create what is being called a "social news site".
It will rely partly on web users sending it news and blog postings and ranking them. It will also feature news from traditional news sites posted by users.
The news will be slotted into more than 30 categories, from movies to food, health and travel with Netscape editors adding material to the topics ranked top by users.
The editors or anchors, as Netscape calls them, will choose what to highlight and what they consider important stories. They will also comment on stories or do original reporting.
Jason McCabe Calacanis, the senior vice-president at AOL heading up the revamp, said: "We are not trying to write a 1,000-word piece. When someone has written the 1,000-word piece, we will write the 100-word update."
This will make the site different from blogs in some ways, which are often mostly commentary, but with many blogs breaking news these days AOL's new Netscape venture will have tough competition.
The new move is certainly a gamble, a decade after its IPO in 1995 that kick-started the dotcom boom and seven years after AOL bought Netscape for $10bn, and some analysts are sceptical as to whether it will be a success, but AOL hopes that by offering something different to blogs, traditional news sites and to the existing Google, Yahoo! and MSN news portals it will be able to attract an audience.
Jonathan Miller, AOL's chief executive, said: "We want to marry the great editorial skill of humans and what systems and software can do to create something that is different and better."
Netscape started life as a browser, which was snuffed out by Microsoft's Internet Explorer, before being reinvented as a web portal and home for AOL's soon-to-be-defunct dial-up access offering.
The news site will be tested this week and then rolled out on July 1.
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