By David Trinko
The Lima News
More than 20 years ago, one of my old editors uttered words that were unthinkable: “We need to think beyond the limits of the newspaper page.”
It seemed ridiculous to me and my coworkers at the time. We joked about designing pages with multiple stories printed in different colors in the same spot, requiring people to use special glasses to see one story of the other. We scoffed at his disregard of a two-dimensional page.
Yet here I am today, saying the same thing to you: We need to think beyond the limits of the newspaper page. If you’ve read The Lima News this week, you may have noticed some weird three-quarter-inch boxes with lots of little squares in the paper.
These QR codes are the best we can do to help bridge the gap between your printed newspaper and the assortment of online offerings we have available for you. You should be able to take pictures of them with your phone or tablet, and they’ll direct you to additional content on the Internet.
We’ve started printing these with game stories in our sports section, so you can see more of the fantastic photographs taken by our talented photojournalists. Over time, you’ll see more of them directing you to videos, interactive graphics and related stories online.
It’s a bit of an experiment to help people see all the extra things our staff generates that can’t necessarily fit into the printed newspaper in the number of pages economically feasible or with our daily deadlines.
It’s not our first try at using QR codes. We tried them about 10 years ago, but most people didn’t know what to do with them. They reemerged during the COVID-19 crisis, particularly thanks to sit-down restaurants asking you to scan a code to see a menu. The technology is better and easier to use, and people have finally adopted it.
It’s a good reminder that your local journalists are doing more creative work today than ever before. They’re truly multimedia journalists, putting together stories, galleries of photographs, videos and sometimes podcasts to go with their work.
It’s also a great reminder that people consume our work in a variety of ways, whether it’s online with LimaOhio.com, in the printed newspaper, via our Digital Edition, on Facebook or Twitter or through listening to headlines on your smart speaker.
We hope our print readers enjoy this link to the expanded coverage available online. We’re still envisioning the power of linking our printed paper so you can easily find additional work online.
We’re training our staff to become better multimedia journalists, telling stories you care about in ways that fit the confines of the daily miracle delivered to your doorstep but offering you additional layers of depth on different digital platforms. It’ll be our pleasure to share more and more of our reporting that previously just had to be left out.
We’re just getting started with this, but I thought it was important to help map out the goal and explain what those little black boxes on the pages were all about. It’s an exciting time to be in journalism, where those laughable ideas 20 years ago are finally coming true.
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See past columns by David Trinko at LimaOhio.com/tag/trinko.
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David Trinko is editor of The Lima News. Reach him at 567-242-0467, by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Lima_Trinko.
