When I worked for newspapers, it was tough to know how readers felt about most stories I wrote.

Sure, there were the articles (one or two a year, maybe) that sparked a wave of phone calls, e-mails and letters. But mostly, we wrote the stories, you read them, or didn't read them, and that's all we knew.

Not so on the World Wide Internet. I can punch up a stats page that tells me, in excruciating detail, how many people are reading our site each month, day and hour.

We've had four editorial interns covering Chicago for the last month, and their work has given us a ton of interesting, exclusive content that we didn't have before. Site readership in June was up 21 percent.

This leads me to believe there's a clear relationship between quality of news content and readership. Which makes me worried for the Trib, the Sun-Times, and many of the country's other big newspapers. In an effort to cut costs, they've shed hundreds of talented journalists and are publishing thinner newspapers because of it.

The idea behind those moves is that consumers won't notice they're getting fewer and less interesting stories for the same fifty cents.

But readers notice.  They don't read you as much. You make less money on ads. And your cost-cutting measure turns into a revenue-cutting measure.