I want a FastPass line for my Newspaper

I am 40 years old (at least for the next few couple months)

This means that I am right between the young "All I do is Twitter all day" generation (which they really don't... Twitter, I mean) and the more mature "I liked my New York Times when the pages were black and white and smeared on my fingers" crowd. So while I am not about to start telling people to "get off my lawn," I still need coaching from my son on who the last airbender really was.

But I found out last week what I want out of my newspaper. Even though no one calls me up to ask my opinion, that's what blogs are for right?

Here it is: "I wanna go to Disneyland!"

Well actually, "I just went to Disneyworld because I was in Orlando for MediaEXchange, and I realized that I hate standing in lines and what an amazing job they did with FastPasses, not the part where you can only get one, but the part where you don't have to stand in line and this is a really bad run-on sentence here but I hope you get my point."

So in plain English: A normal Broadsheet newspaper is too cumbersome for me to enjoy. Think about standing in a 90 minute line to get where you want to go; your back starts to hurt, you start to question if it was really worth it. But the ride is fabulous, so you put up with the slogging through the line. Broadsheet news is a pain for me. I want to read the news at my desk, but my desk is no place to read a broadsheet. Those of you who may have seen my office will agree it looks like a Brooklyn subway during rush hour. So many days, even though I subscribe to a daily newspaper (thank you, Salt Lake Tribune), I don't bother reading it because I don't want to wrestle with it. Reading the news online only, is like getting on a kiddie ride. Sure it was fast and got me to go around in a circle, but it is not the immersive experience I want from my news.

Tabloid shaped newspapers are my idea of a FastPass. I still get the whole ride, but I don't have to wrestle with size of the broadsheet. I don't want a dumbed down 4 page "commuter edition." I don't live in a place where I can take a train to work anyway. I want all the news that fits to print in my tabloid size, easy to carry, simple to prop up on my desk format.

Please don't fall into the traps some papers get with "Small format" sizes. Please continue to jump stories. I don't want you to cut back on the quality of the writing just because you are worried about cramming each story into a single page. Jump a bunch of stories from the front to the insides. Have a story jump multiple pages. I can take it in a tabloid, because it feels like a magazine, and I expect my magazine-quality stories to run over many pages.

I want color... Lots of it. Invest in a good press that does color on every page. I like magazines because (Like Disneyworld) they draw me in with fabulous design. Sports Illustrated last week ran an ad with Michael Phelps, "We surf the internet, we swim in magazines." Cheers to them for capturing the essence of how I like my news... immersive without drowning in the size of the page.

I want my daily newspaper to let me swim through it, just like a magazine.

Now get off my lawn!

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