I thought to myself several times how awesome Pandora is. A commercial free radio station built just for me delivered right to my living room stereo. Pandora is the epitome of what the internet should be, all about me. Exactly what I want, when I want it and how I want it with no strings attached.

This is why I laughed so hard when I downloaded the XM Radio app. I already subscribe to XM through the unit in my car. I think I pay around $12 a month. That price is going up however because the music industry wants more royalties so it will probably be around $15 a month. Trust me when I say I’m real close to dropping the service because of this. So when I fired up the iPhone app for the first time and I got stopped because my subscription isn’t good enough. I need to pay an additional $3 a month for online access. I laughed my ass off and then got really pissed off. Three more bucks a month for a service I already pay for, just a different delivery method? They have lost their minds! Pandora is ten times better then XM and it’s totally free.

I guess some people just don’t get it and are destined to fail. Which brings me to the newspaper industry. (LOL, nice transition eh?) What if papers adopted the Pandora philosophy of what, how and when I want it with no strings attached? Let’s tackle the money issue first. I don’t mind banner ads as long as they don’t expand, speak or move around. Just stay in the sidebar like a good ad should and I’m cool with that. There should also only be one to two ads max. Newspaper websites look like a flea market right now. It’s disgusting! I say clear it all out and charge a premium for that single sidebar placement. A single quality ad that is targeted for me might actually get me to click on it. What a concept, advertising that works!

How about the actual content? The very best part of Pandora is that I can define my radio station. I give a thumbs up to a song and it plays more like it while a thumbs down will avoid similar songs. It is constantly learning what I want. Could papers do this? Could they create content that the user actually wants and then constantly refine it until the user essentially has their own custom newspaper? How great would that be! Have a thumbs up and down on every story so that I can tell the paper, feed me more stories like this and less stories like that. Don’t take those results and apply them to everyone, just to me. Everyone would get exactly what they want and how great is that! The technology to do it is there but the mindset of the newsroom isn’t. Don’t tell me what I should be reading, I’ll tell you what to feed me and if you don’t like it then goodbye.

With so many things all competing for our attention today, it’s silly to think that users are going to continue to put up with products and services that don’t deliver exactly what the user wants, when they want and in a medium that is convenient. Look at how DVR has taken this concept and changed TV. Podcasts and Pandora are doing this right now to radio. So when will newspapers change?

In a typical day I consume a lot of information. Throughout the day I scan blogs, Twitter feeds and occasionally jump into my RSS reader. This is mostly all design and technology related information and not what you would call traditional news. When it comes to world news I have a single top story widget on my iGoogle page from MSNBC and if a headline catches my eye I’ll check the story out. Every morning I get an email from the News & Observer showing me the top headlines for NC State and the Carolina Hurricanes. If a headline peaks my interest I’ll read the full story and then typically navigate away from the N&O. Sometimes I listen to podcasts throughout the day but the ones I subscribe to rarely contain any news in the traditional sense. While in the car as I travel to and from work I have local sports radio on. This totals to maybe 30 minutes a day but radio is full of commercials so I typically only get 10-15 minutes of real content and opinion. In the evening I religiously watch Pardon the Interruption. I am a big sports fan and the PTI format is great for getting a good mix of the day’s top stories. After PTI is finished I rarely if ever consume any more news for the day.

So lets summarize my typical day. I actively find specialized content that really interests me (design & tech news). I let information that I’m casually interested in become the background noise of my day (sports). I ignore everything else because I believe that if an item of news is truly important it will find me.

So now I pose the question to you… what is your typical day when it comes to information consumption? If you have a free minute write a comment below describing your typical day when it comes to news and information. Try to touch on the kind of content you encounter and the medium you use to engage with it. If the content is delivered to you then how? Would you consider yourself a light news reader or a news junkie? I’m hoping that responses will help me paint a better picture of how people consume news and this will hopefully lead me to better design.