SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - It appears the Chicago Tribune is hell-bent on winning back one reader it recently lost to the Wall Street Journal, a paper the reader said “easily surpasses the Chicago Tribune.”

Chicago resident Coleen Davison’s letter to the WSJ praising the paper has generated quite the buzz in the journalism world.

The WSJ ran Davison’s fan letter to them verbatim as a full-page ad for the WSJ in Wednesday’s Chicago Sun-Times.  In the letter she said, “The caliber and depth of (WSJ) reporting is incredible and easily surpasses that of the Chicago Tribune.”

In correspondence with Tribune editors trying to win her back, Davison called the paper’s September redesign ”dressed up, dumbed-down news sound bites,” according to the Chicago Reader’s News Bites ‘blog.

The Reader reported that the Trib took Davison on a tour of its newsroom and let her sit in on a daily editorial board meeting — all in the hope of adding her subscription back to the rolls.

Apparently that was still not enough to persuade her.

“Davison left the Tower that day knowing three things: She’d just been treated extremely well. The Tribune would not be going back to what it was. She would not be going back to the Tribune,” the Reader wrote.