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The function of newspapers will never be obsolete. Reporting and sharing information is the fundamental purpose of newspapers and for that and other purposes, their presence will always be necessary. The news must be disseminated for the protection of rights and justice. In this post, I am strictly referring to newspapers’ obsolescence in the physical form. With the growing use of mobile devices and integration of the internet, newspapers are no longer something people have to purchase and physically hold to receive news. Could QR codes change that?
One of the biggest problems with print is that it doesn’t integrate nicely with web and mobile markets. I can’t bookmark a story in a paper. I can’t flip to a related link in another section. The shortcomings of print are exactly what has propelled the consumer to get more news on the web.
Newspapers are faced with:
- Fewer pages for in-depth stories because of falling revenues
- Limited ways to engage users online directly from the print product
- Limits in how they interact with local online communities
QR codes are poised to change the game.
Save paper space and bring back in-depths
Fewer print advertisements have meant many papers have scaled back the number of pages they print. Fewer pages mean fewer stories or inches for longer pieces. To solve this, some papers have printed notes that longer versions of stories are available online. But how good is that without a direct link to the stories?
Instead, newspapers could save even more paper space by shortening the longer stories, putting even more content online and placing QR codes in their stories that would send readers to the online version with their mobile devices.
Now the full story is much more reader-friendly and saves the paper money.
You might be saying ‘Who wants to read a long in-depth story on their phone?’ Good point. QR codes have a solution for that too.
QR codes could make papers’ stories bookmark-able
Ever ask to borrow some one’s paper in a coffee shop but didn’t have time to finish a great article you found? Would be kind of rude to take the stranger’s paper, wouldn’t it?
What if that story had a QR code that allowed you to save the web URL of the story and save it to a social bookmarking service such as del.icio.us? Would you go back and read the story online? My guess is you just might!
Enter Qtags – a bookmarking service that allows you to save messages from QR advertisements and send memos to yourself.
Adding bookmarking capabilities to your newspapers’ stories increase their chances of circulation and of being shared with a wider audience. Yes!
Newspapers could become an interactive shopping guide
I mentioned in my previous post on QR codes turning newspapers into cash cows that newspapers may be able to place affiliate links in their codes to sell products they are already reviewing.
I know there’s been plenty of times I saw something reviewed in a story that I wanted to buy immediately after seeing the story – possibly a concert or a new electronic gizmo. Instead, I most likely would have to remember to save the article or do some searching on the web to find the item I read about.
By adding a shopping guide component through no extra work but adding a little image, a newspaper can broaden its readership to shopping socialites – codes can even include addresses of local stores that sell reviewed items!
Newspapers could become real-time city guides
Some of the most interesting stories for local people are restaurant or venue reviews and event previews. The hard part is remembering where that restaurant was or who is playing and when.
By using QR codes, newspapers can send readers menus, specials and addresses of reviewed restaurants to help people make a better choice about where they want to eat on Friday night. Event previews can also include data that will sync with a phone’s calendaring service so users never forget when they need to buy tickets.
There’s no need to go back and fumble through a wrinkled stack of papers to find the information that the consumer wants. Newspapers can immediately become immensely more useful.
More useful=more buy-able.
Image by akaalias
Physical papers could better engage communities through linking!
To succeed on the web, news websites need to do a better job of linking to community websites and blogs. After publishing a story about the latest school board meeting fiasco, the news site needs to link to local community blogs talking about the incident. That’s being a good community guide.
Other than printing a snippet of what the blogosophere is saying, newspapers are extremely limited in how they can interact with the local community. Now with QR tags, newspapers can send users to referenced blogs and community sites and past stories so community members can get more information about a reported topic.
Talk about finally engaging the community in real conversation!
A couple more examples
David Harper has a great list of other uses for QR tags, including linking to podcasts, building games or scavenger hunts, “find me” maps, creating newspaper-branded walking audio tours (at bottom of page) and others. Check them out!
What’s next?
Now that you’ve got a good idea of what QR codes are, how they could help generate revenue and how they could make newspapers more relevant to mobile consumers, it’s time to learn how you can get started using them. Look forward to the next post!
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Shawn,
Excellent. Is there a way to easily generate these QR codes?
I’d like to experiment.
Definitely. Just go ahead and do a search for QR code generators – Here’s one http://reader.kaywa.com/ – I’ll be posting a resources post tomorrow with more options
It sounds like the QR codes have solved most of the obstacles that doomed the Cue Cat. It would be fun to think up uses for this. Some lingering questions though: For someone who’s online and mobile, what does the paper add? Will mobile info consumers already be connected to the info the paper wants to send them to? Will they make a side trip to the paper to find out about stuff that’s on their mobile phone? I guess what I’m getting at is, if the marketing value of this is to say, “It’s like an html page, but on paper; you can ‘click’ on it and everything,” what if people say, “but I’ve already got html pages, and I don’t need to fool with the paper.” As much as I love the idea, I wonder if it’s for that same large but shrinking group of people for whom information starts out on paper (but are techy enough to have camera phones), while the growing group of people live in an online world of feeds and streams, and never pick up the paper.
I’m just trying to give the idea a thorough vetting. What will make paper a part of people’s lives again, if they get what they need online?
I think mobile is great and people are going to love getting information on these devices, but I think the size of a mobile device also puts limits on how much someone would like to use it for everything. I don’t have an iPhone yet, so I’m not the perfect one to answer this, but I can’t imagine a mobile person really wants to surf constantly on their phone. Just like newspapers should be guides to the internet with their news sites, I think papers can also serve as guides in mobile. The trick is to figure out the most effective way to be that guide. The thing I’m getting at is you can’t lug around a computer, and as advanced and nice as some mobile units are, they aren’t adequately sized to provide the browsing usability that a desktop or laptop can. But you can grab a light paper and use the mobile device to compliment your newsgathering. No I haven’t seen this in action (going to Japan in July though, so I have a better idea then) – but I think it is possible, and what do papers have to lose by trying it?
I’m not totally buying it — any plan that begins with “First, every company has to stop what they’re doing and do this instead” seems doomed to failure. What I find more plausible is that cell phone cameras and processing power will both get good enough so cell phones can easily read existing bar codes — Android already has this in the spec for Amazon searches via bar code. This might give the idea enough traction that it wouldn’t seem weird to do so, but even then, the momentum will be behind traditional UPC codes and not QR codes.
UPC symbols come with too much baggage, imho. 2D codes (the more technically correct term — QR or “quick response” refers more specifically to the particular standards-based code used widely in Europe) has promise precisely because there are several free, downloadable browsers that interact with them. Anchoring anything to Amazon — or any single system — is not how the Web, or any innovation works. First, exceptional article. Second, I think the key to adoption here will be useful tools/platforms for advertisers and publishers to be able to easily design campaigns that enable users to navigate between print, the Web, and mobile/on-the-go services depending on WHERE THEY ARE and what they’re doing. (Mobile Discovery has one such platform.) What I love about this is ease of use combined with user choice. I can scan a code now and find out when the bus will be here. I can scan an ad, and return to it later when I have some time to look into my insurance or retirement options. Once saved, a great offer becomse viral and carries with it the endorsement of my peers (you can not just save/bookmark something, but share it with friends.) This breathes new live into print publications because articles can become more accessible. Newspapers should be all over this because they can save printing costs — of course they may not be so happy about Shawn’s “over the shoulder” scanning suggestion ;-). But, back to the control issue — what if you could include a “subscribe” button and pay for it with your phone too? This is WAY more interesting than waiting for the next generation of wi-fi readers in my opinion. Both print and online retain their value, but as places to discover and share information, not just consume it once and throw it away. Parting note — I was on a plane yesterday out of IAD and a guy next to me had a copy of Welt, the German newspaper with 2D codes in it, so this is no pipe dream…