Editor’s notebook: NewsVu connects digital to print | Local News

You now have a much easier way of accessing all the digital content that the Missoulian has to offer.

In today’s print edition, we’re introducing a new feature called NewsVu, which uses QR codes to link you to more information online, such as breaking news coverage, videos, podcasts, photo galleries, digitized court documents, interactive digital graphics and a host of other features.

There’s a QR code displayed with this story — it’s small, square, and looks sort of like a Rorschach inkblot test gone awry.

This one links to a a nice time-lapse video of comic artists painting a mural at the Zootown Arts Community Center (ZACC).

Just get your smartphone and open its camera app, point directly at the QR code, tap the banner/url that pops up on your screen, and you’ll be taken directly online to the video.

This is a vast improvement from the past, when we had to tell readers to go to Missoulian.com to view that video and others.

For example, we featured a story and photos in Friday’s newspaper about those comic artists, including a blurb on A1: “To see a video of the ZACC gallery comic-style mural, visit this story online …”

If you wanted to watch it, you had go to the website and find it — not always an easy proposition. Now, using your smartphone, you could be watching it within seconds. Give it a try!

Our parent company, Lee Enterprises, has provided our newsroom with relatively easy-to-use tools to produce these QR codes, so you should expect to see them with some regularity.

Our photographers routinely shoot far more powerful photos than we can possibly use in print. In such cases, a QR code will take you to a collection of other photos that we couldn’t fit in your paper copy of the news. Today’s edition features a QR code for photos of Saturday’s Lady Griz basketball game.

In another example, when a night game concludes too late to include in the print sports pages, we can give you a QR code to read the final result online. We’re a digital-first operation, meaning we don’t wait until the next day to write live game stories.

When we write about a government study, we can link to the PDF so that you can read it yourself. Likewise with court documents and other publicly released bits of legal evidence.

This technology helps bridge the gap between the printed newspaper and the array of digital-only content we produce every day.

Not everyone has a smartphone, of course. But data shows that a growing and significant number of the Missoulian’s subscribers read us on their phones. And QR codes are becoming more ubiquitous — people routinely use them for comparison shopping in store aisles and for taking advantage of restaurant coupon offers.

If you run into an issue with a QR code, or just need assistance to walk you through it, shoot us an email at [email protected] and we’ll get someone to lend you a hand.

I think this is pretty cool stuff. We hope you will, too.

Jim Van Nostrand is executive editor of the Missoulian. Reach him at [email protected]