Abstract
A three-week constructed sample shows that few U.S. newspapers publish Quick Response (QR) codes on front pages and that many of the published codes were beyond newsroom control. Content analysis describes QR use by papers in the context of diffusion of innovation and niche-gratification theories and compares published “deep” links with randomly selected pages. Interviews with newspaper executives reveal institutional isomorphism reasons for QR adoption and the belief that QR has little widespread acceptance by readers or the industry.
Keywords
Introduction
As newspapers move deeper into the digital era, the front page of nearly every U.S. newspaper includes its uniform resource locator (URL) to connect print readers to content on the World Wide Web. 1 Some papers also drive traffic online through the front-page inclusion of Quick Response (QR) codes, two-dimensional barcodes that, when scanned by a smartphone or a similar device, take the reader to a predetermined URL link or deliver other digital information. Denso Wave Corporation 2 created the technology in 1994 for Toyota Motor Corporation, to help the carmakers’ employees maintain accurate inventory by scanning codes on automotive parts. Denso Wave’s decision to let others adopt QR technology without royalty payments has contributed to its acceptance as a worldwide standard; QR codes appear on everything from billboards to catsup bottles, from potted plant packages to tattooed humans. 3
QR codes also are appearing in newspapers as a way to complement traditional textual URLs that have appeared in print since the 1990s. Whether QR or text, printed links move consumers to content too timely for newsprint, such as breaking news, sports scores, stock quotes, and weather conditions. 4 Links direct readers to content not in the printed edition newspaper, such as additional photos, articles, and videos. They let readers download paper-specific apps, contact circulation departments, or participate in polls. They also serve as a part of revenue-enhancing efforts, as advertisers can use QR to send readers directly to websites.
QR began appearing in newspapers during the late 2000s, and the number of papers using it appears to have risen in a symbiotic relationship with rising sales of mobile phones and other devices that decode QR codes. 5 The potential compensatory functions of QR and similar two-dimensional barcode technology over textual URLs seem obvious to some for print media, 6 as QR can more quickly move users to complicated URLs, known as “extended” or “deep” links. Despite the advantages, however, many argue that QR is failing to reach mass acceptance. 7
This research uses quantitative and qualitative methodologies to discover how and why newspapers use QR to reach readers, in the context of literatures related to technology adoption and organizational decision making. It measures and describes the use of QR and extended URLs on front pages of papers across the United States during a three-week constructed sample collected during 2012 and early 2013, with a focus on links controlled by newsrooms. It compares URL linking habits of 791 front pages with QR codes against the extended URL-linking habits of 591 randomly selected front pages without QR, testing the assumption that news organizations that have adopted QR have more of an “online mindset” than papers without QR. In addition, interviews with news executives from sixteen newspapers that published QR codes during the research period provide perspective for QR use. Given continued declines in print circulation and the public’s continued move to mobile digital devices to consume news, it is hoped that this study can provide insight into QR-usage trends while shaping discussion about technology adoption for academicians and best practices for news organizations.
Literature Review
This section briefly discusses QR in the historical context of emerging electronic technologies adopted by print-centric news organizations to compensate for print’s inherent limitations of timeliness and reader interaction and QR in the context of Diffusion of Innovation and other theories related to the adoption of new technologies.
New Technologies for Print
The print newspaper industry’s nearly century-long efforts to engage audiences beyond printed pages have produced mixed results. The Pittsburgh Post provided election returns for radio station KDKA on November 2, 1920, the first scheduled broadcast of a commercial radio station, and some newspapers bought stations (such as the Chicago Tribune’s WGN, which stood for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”) while others sought to limit radio journalism. 8 Despite concerns by the Federal Communications Commission over monopolies of news and information, some newspapers moved into the television business and shared news resources in the 1950s. 9 Ultimately, failed efforts to use radio signals to deliver news via facsimile machines started as early as the 1930s. 10 In the late 1980s, some newspapers introduced audiotext (such as 1-900 phone lines) to let callers hear updated news and stock quotes, as well as amusements such as horoscopes and soap opera updates. 11 Newspapers first ventured online during the 1980s with systems including Knight Ridder’s Viewtron and Times-Mirror’s Gateway, both of which lost tens of millions of investors’ dollars before closing in 1986. Concomitantly, some papers began delivering information via electronic bulletin board and/or proprietary consumer online services. 12
By the late 1990s, nearly all newspapers were beginning to provide Internet content as the Web became both the world’s ubiquitous electronic platform and a disruptive technology 13 that has reshaped the economics and news ecologies of traditional newspapers. The Web’s new paradigm brought an attacker’s advantage over print news delivery, because the Web “addresses a differently ordered set of performance parameters valued in a . . . network” 14 —in this case, the “network” of news consumers. Some in the print industry sought to bridge this gap between print and online via the CueCat, the first effort to use code-scanning devices to send print readers to Internet-delivered content; it was an economic and technological failure that ended a little more than a year after its 1999 debut. 15 QR technology is analogous to the CueCat, but with improvements discussed below. Ultimately, QR has been seen as providing an incremental increase in print’s ability to deliver information, making it a “sustaining” technology in an industry whose revenues fell by half between 2007 and 2012 16 and fell another 2.6% in 2013. 17
While it is unclear whether QR codes will reach mass acceptance, it has surpassed adoption rates of competing technologies. Roughly half of participants in a 2011-12 survey were aware of QR codes, with usage rates ranging from around 30% for young adults to below 20% for middle-age and older adults—likely a function of ownership of smart phones. 18 Nearly half of all consumer QR scans in 2011 were of codes printed in newspapers and magazines, making print media the top source of codes scanned by consumers. 19 This is not surprising, Pavlik and Bridges noted, because in “print media, consumers have a relatively simple, unconstrained opportunity to use their mobile device to scan the code” compared with television commercials and other fleeting media messages. 20 Use of mobile devices to consume news is rising, according to the Pew Center’s 2013 “State of the Media” report, 21 making it vital for news organizations to find better ways to deliver online content. QR may be a way—if adopted by news organizations and then by consumers.
Theories Related to Technology Adoption
Everett Rogers described his Diffusion of Innovation theory as the process by which any sort of “(1) an innovation is (2) communicated through certain channels (3) over time (4) among the members of a social system.” 22 Some media innovations, such as the Internet and DVDs, are accepted quickly; others, such as the aforementioned CueCat, lack many of the “perceived attributions of innovations,” including little advantage over status quo, great complexity, and limited trialability or observability required to let potential users see the innovation and try it for themselves. 23
QR technology appears to meet some of Rogers’s perceived attributes of innovations but falls short in others. Its movement toward becoming an international standard is tied to a key “commercialism” advantage, 24 because codes can be created and consumed for free. On the other hand, QR technology complements existing smart device technology but remains a mystery to many people because few smartphone operating systems include a native code-reading application. This adds to the technology’s complexity (as does Internet access and similar exterior forces), and it also limits trialability and observability.
Diffusion theory underpins the notion that newspapers publishing QR codes have moved beyond a “homepage” mindset; that is, editors realize that more readers have discovered the “relative advantage” 25 of bypassing newspaper homepages to directly access deep-linked content. 26 This can be attributed to search engines and social media delivering direct access to deep links and (to a lesser extent) QR use. This relative advantage seems obvious for QR’s ability to send a user to an Internet resource without having to type a long URL, but it is unclear whether the public believes that QR possesses what Rogers called the “social prestige factors, convenience, and satisfaction” factors that are at least as important in innovation acceptance. 27 Inasmuch as this relative advantage is defined as “the degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes,” 28 the question is whether QR is perceived by newspaper executives and readers as a better way of gratifying readers’ needs to access online information than by merely printing textual URLs. In uses and gratification theory, this is a question of QR’s ability to meet needs defined as cognitive (acquiring information), affective (pleasure), personal integrative (credibility and status), social integrative (family and friends), and tension release (diversion). 29 QR codes in newspapers could potentially meet many of these needs, especially the cognitive need usually associated with news consumption. 30
Whether QR meets these gratifications is beyond the scope of this research but ripe for niche-gratification theory, which can “explain the consequences attending the rise of a new medium.” 31 Dimmick’s discussion of the “gratification-utility niche” implies that because both QR and printed URLs accomplish the same task, they have a low niche overlap, defined as a “high similarity in gratifications obtained from the two media.” A similar low niche overlap has been found for the Internet over print for news, 32 for the Internet over magazines, 33 and free dailies over paid sports-focused papers. 34 Less easily understood is QR’s competitive superiority, which asks “whether one or the other of a pair of media provides greater gratification utility.” 35 QR has advantages over conventional text-based URLs. For QR creators, the codes are easy to make and to track usage for editorial and marketing reasons, and to improve an audience’s consumption experience by sending users directly to “extended” or “absolute” URLs that are unwieldy to print in a newspaper and to type into a web browser. On the other hand, QR’s advantages are limited by the need to own a device, to have it nearby, to have the QR application installed and readily available, to maintain a steady hand when scanning codes on low-quality paper, and by news organizations creating sites and content that meet readers’ uses and gratifications. QR also may fail the “two-second” rule of thumb, based on research showing that consumers are less likely to use technology that requires more than two seconds to access. 36 These issues of competition and coexistence can best be answered through survey research and by tracking acceptance trends of new media technology, similar to the future of niche research. 37
Ultimately, two cycles of diffusions must occur before mass acceptance of the innovation of QR can occur: newspapers must adopt QR to make it available to readers, and readers must then decide to adopt the technology. This paper focuses on acceptance by news executives and can be understood through the literature of institutional isomorphism, the theory that “organizations seek legitimacy by becoming more like others in their environments.” 38 This is a force in journalism, such as “pack journalism” in which competing news organizations often publish similar information for fear of appearing different from competitors 39 to having similar appearance, such as when USA Today’s 1982 debut of color weather maps led many papers to quickly add color weather maps. 40
DiMaggio and Powell 41 described three types of isomorphism, which can be explained in the context of this study as “coercive,” in which pressure or other expectations derive from a parent organization or other external force; “mimetic,” in which an organization follows models in their behavior; and “normative,” which develops through the professionalization of an industry through such things as trade association meetings, mores developed through formal education, or hiring from within the industry. This theory helps categorize forces that contributed to newspapers’ decisions to introduce QR technology on their front pages. Related to this scholarship is the phenomenon of journalistic homogeneity, which discusses the “sameness” that occurs when news organizations imitate each other in news approaches, technologies, and content. 42 Each type of isomorphism can contribute to a homogeneity among news organizations, through design or pages dotted with QR icons or delivery of the same content across news organizations that share a corporate owner.
Research Questions and Hypotheses
This research uses multiple methodologies to discover more about the use of QR in print newspapers, through content analysis and directed interviews with executives at newspapers that include the codes. As it is among the first to study this still-emerging technology and emerging use in newspapers, this research included both research questions and a hypothesis to guide the work. With the assumption that nearly every paper prints its front-page URL, the focus was on the extent to which papers drive readers to “deep content” (defined as specific content found in extended URLs, not merely a link to a homepage), given QR’s competitive advantage over printed extended URLs. That focus led to
This general question leads to the research’s lone hypothesis, based upon the assumption that papers using QR codes would be more likely than others to publish “deep” URLs in print. It assumes they better accommodate readers who appreciate the relative advantage of direct links over mere links to homepages. It will be tested by comparing textual URLs published in papers with QR codes with textual URLs in papers without QR:
The second research question is designed to provide context to RQ1 and H1 and ameliorate the concern that content analysis “by itself cannot explain why the message is as it is.” 43
This question will be discussed based upon trends uncovered during interviews with more than a dozen executives whose newspapers used QR codes during the analysis period. A key focus is QR adoption decisions, based upon institutional isomorphism theory.
Method
To gather quantitative data, a 21-day constructed sample 44 of 1,382 U.S. newspaper front pages was built between May 2012 and January 2013. Each day of a week was sampled three times (e.g., Mondays on May 28, July 2, and November 12) to ensure consistency across days and because some papers did not publish daily or varied design on different days. 45 The pages were collected from “Today’s Front Pages” at www.newseum.org, a daily-updated site displaying PDF versions of front pages submitted by U.S. newspapers. A typical day shows 500 front pages published by the nation’s approximately 1,350 daily papers 46 ; while some newspapers never submit front pages and others only sporadically, the site has been used previously as a representative sample of American dailies for content analysis. 47 Newspapers may publish QR anywhere in a print edition, but this research focused on front pages because they were the most easily accessible on a continuing basis, because news organizations tend to publish their most important content on the front page, and front-page use suggests a paper’s commitment to QR. During the sampling period, 791 front pages with a QR code were collected and coded, as well as 591 randomly selected pages without QR codes for comparison—an average of 28 random pages per sampled day.
The researchers created a codebook to describe the content of each paper’s QR codes and “extended” URLs, defined as links to anywhere except directly to the paper’s main homepage. All logos, links, or QR codes to a paper’s social media links were included to further elicit an understanding of a newspaper’s desire to show readers its digital presence; advertising references to social media were coded as advertising. Categories were divided into QR codes controlled by the newsroom, and those beyond newsroom control—advertising, to the paper’s circulation department or to download the paper’s smartphone application. Table 1 describes coding definitions.
Coding Sheet Definitions of Uses for QR Codes and Extended URLs Found on Newspaper Front Pages.
Note. QR = Quick Response; URL = uniform resource locator.
Three students were trained to independently code front pages using a Web form and an online database built by the researcher. Every page was coded at least twice, and coders were encouraged to use QR readers on their smartphones. Coders independently reached agreement on more than 80% of the newspapers they coded, including more than 90% agreement on QR purposes. Most errors involved difficulties in finding URLs inside news stories. Before data analysis, the lead researcher addressed discrepancies among coders by comparing results against the original page and updating that paper’s entry as needed.
To collect qualitative data to provide insight into RQ2, during late summer and fall 2012, a master’s student sought to contact newsroom decision makers at nearly fifty papers using QR. A query letter, E-mail, and/or phone call went to each paper and at least one follow-up to non-respondents. Structured interviews were conducted during fall 2012 with sixteen newsroom managers to learn about the paper’s decision to use QR, how it has been implemented, reader response, and suggestions for the industry. Respondents were promised confidentiality to provide them freedom to make comments that might differ from their bosses’ or corporate owners’ guidelines.
Results
RQ1: QR Use on Front Pages
In the 21 days of front pages, 889 QR codes were observed on 791 front pages of 158 individual newspapers. On a typical sample day, 7.5% of front pages at the “Today’s Front Pages” site included at least one QR code, ranging from a high of 11.6% on August 1 (a Wednesday, boosted by grocery store advertising) to a minimum of 3.8% on December 23 (the Sunday before Christmas). No single front page included more than three QR codes, and a longitudinal analysis revealed no discernible patterns. A statistical test showed no relationship between newspaper circulation size and presence or absence of QR. Table 2 shows the number of QR codes and extended URLs on those pages, by category, with subtotals by codes controlled by newsrooms and not controlled by newsrooms. Table 2 also shows data for randomly selected pages without QR, which will be discussed in the results of
Count of QR Codes, Extended URLs on Paper Front Pages (N = 1,382).
Note. QR = Quick Response; URL = uniform resource locator.
Many QR codes and extended URLs were beyond newsroom control. The analysis showed that 337 (37.9%) QR codes sent users to an advertiser, the paper’s circulation department, or to download the paper’s app. Of papers with QR, 89% also included at least one extended textual URL (usually a repeat of the QR) or social media link, a total of 1,640 URLs. Those links were split nearly equally between those controlled by the newsroom (51%) and those that were not. Advertising was the single largest category of textual URLs, accounting for 42.4% of all URLs in the study. Of the 103 pages with QR but no extended URL, 41 (39.8%) QR codes were beyond newsroom control.
As niche-gratification theory suggests, QR works best as a replacement for extended URLs. But the analysis showed that 282 (51.1%) of the 552 QR codes controlled by newsrooms went to the paper’s homepage or to a “breaking news” page that essentially duplicated homepage content. Of other newsroom-controlled QR codes, 187 (33.9%) linked to online video or photo sites, and 57 (10.3%) sent users to text-focused links for news and feature stories.
A key finding is that newspapers with QR were more likely to use QR than absolute links to send users to photos or videos or to download apps. QR was used in 75% of the papers’ 92 references to video, 54.4% of the 217 references to online photos, and 60.2% of the papers’ 93 references to smartphone apps. While many URLs duplicated a QR code, it shows a commitment by many papers to send users to deep links via QR.
Papers included ten QR codes to social network sites; logos and/or URLs were the overwhelming way that papers sent users to social network sites. This is not surprising, given widespread recognition of Twitter and Facebook logos and the relative ease of finding a paper’s content on those social media sites. Papers using and not using QR were roughly equal in their percentage of use of logos for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
H1: Comparing QR with Non-QR Papers’ Use of Absolute URLs
The collection also included 591 randomly selected front pages from 271 newspapers that did not include QR codes. Of that sample, 352 pages (59.5%) included at least 1 extended URL, none with more than 8 URLs. Of the sample, 120 (20.3%) published only non-newsroom-controlled links. The randomly selected pages included 724 published URLs, a mean of 1.22 URLs per page. For papers with QR, there were a mean 2.03 URLs on front pages in addition to QR codes.
As Table 2 shows, advertisements were the single largest category of URLs counted on randomly selected pages, at 38.5%. The only other categories with more than 10% were links to non-newspaper sites published by newsrooms in news stories or other content (13.7%) and to Facebook (11.9%).
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that papers with QR present were more likely to also publish extended URLs than papers without QR, F(1, 1380) = 89.314, p < .000. The hypothesis is confirmed.
RQ2: Interviews with Newsroom Executives at Papers Using QR
The first topic for the sixteen executives—how QR began to be used at their newspapers—revealed that mimetic isomorphism as the most likely reason for QR adoption. (Three interviewees mentioned multiple reasons for QR adoption.) This mimicry is not surprising, given the ease of seeing the work of other news organizations and the newspaper industry’s history of adopting practices developed by other papers.
Nine interviewees’ comments suggest mimetic isomorphism, ranging from an editor who said he became intrigued by QR codes on a shopping mall storefront to one who said, “It’s just because we keep up with what’s hot,” to one who said QR makes the paper seem more technologically advanced. Several specifically mentioned USA Today, which introduced two-dimensional barcodes in late 2010 on its front page and selected section fronts, generally linked to photos. Two mentioned that news executives first saw QR in advertising on their pages, which led them to add the technology to better serve readers already familiar with QR in their papers. One said that the decision came after hearing from readers requesting QR to help them find information more easily on their mobile devices.
Mimetic isomorphism best revealed itself in Oklahoma, which has the nation’s twenty-eighth largest population 48 yet ranked third in published QR codes. Four Oklahoma papers, each with different owners, published seventy-eight QR codes. Only California (the nation’s most-population state, with 171 QR codes) and New York (third-most populous, with 80 QR codes) published more codes, and many were published by group-owned papers that duplicated many stories and page designs across geographic markets.
Six interviewees’ comments suggested coercive isomorphism, ranging from a commercial partnership to top-down edicts from higher-level managers. Typical was a newsroom manager who said, “It was something management wanted us to do.”
Coercive isomorphism seems unlikely at many corporations that own large numbers of papers; an analysis of QR use in papers owned by major industry players showed no consistent patterns. For example, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, had twenty-six papers with at least one QR code present during the sample period, but the random sample showed an additional sixteen Gannett papers without QR. Likewise, MediaNews Group papers on the West Coast included the most QR codes of any newspaper chain in the analysis, driven by three papers that shared much of their content and similar design. But no MediaNews papers on the East Coast captured in the random collection included QR. Nonetheless, coercion revealed itself in several interviews of executives pessimistic about the technology. “They’re still an experiment, at least in my mind,” one editor said. “The company’s pretty adamant about it, but it’s sort of like anything else in social media—you throw it against the wall and see what sticks.”
Four interviewees’ explanations suggested normative isomorphism, including a newspaper that adopted QR after executives learned about it at a journalism conference, one whose company-wide committee on digital improvements suggested QR, and one whose outside design consultant recommended QR as part of the paper’s new look. It is possible that some news executives not interviewed for this current research introduced QR after Editor & Publisher, the industry’s key trade publication, highlighted one of its “10 newspapers that do it right” for its QR adoption 49 and one person named to the “25 under 35” list of top young executives cited QR as an emerging technology. 50
The second part of the interviews focused on user response to QR, and several news executives noted that many of their readers still need to be persuaded about the relative advantage of QR. One said he hopes that readers who ignore QR will “one day go, ‘Oh, I wonder what that does?’” Another put hopes in the continuing adoption of smartphones: If we ever get discouraged because it maybe hasn’t grown to the extent we have hoped, we continue to look at the data, the use nationwide, and we believe that some form of these codes is going to continue to grow in our usage and our society. It’s something that we’re committed to continuing to try to refine and to stay with.
Clearly, the chicken-or-the-egg dilemma exists with QR in newspapers. Most interviewees seemed undecided about QR’s effectiveness and adoption, but readers’ QR use cannot rise unless codes are published in newspapers. While none of the news executives interviewed was completely negative toward QR, many described its use as an “experiment,” and some expressed concern that QR was not worth staffers’ time and effort to create codes or worth taking column inches that could be used for other content. “We earn so little for this, but it’s more work for us,” one editor said. “Why are we doing this in the first place?” Another saw little more use for QR than its “cool factor,” saying, “I think it is looked at more of as a cute add-on more than anything profoundly effective.” Another said, I keep hoping that they’re going to take off, but I just don’t see much evidence that they are . . . You can do it for as long as you want, but if no one knows that you’re using them, it’s a wasted effort and wasted resource.
This general pessimism further shows itself in answers to questions about how papers analyze statistics of reader QR use. Analytic software can track the number, URL destination (and, sometimes, geography) of QR users, but few interviewees were willing to cite statistics of QR usage, and some said they simply did not know. Just five of sixteen interviewees said QR-usage analytics were tracked more than weekly; many said numbers were too low to bother tracking. One editor suggested that QR codes must be all right because readers have not responded, “I haven’t heard a lot from readers, and they like to complain about stuff.”
Discussion and Conclusion: Limited Adoption, Failure to Use QR for Relative Advantage
A major finding of this research is that QR technology has seen limited adoption by news organizations. With an average of 7.5% of papers including QR in each daily sample, it can be argued that newspaper adoption of QR has barely moved past the “innovators” phase and into the “early adopters” phase of adopter categorization. 51 Newspaper adoption from the sample nearly matches QR’s overall public adoption rate of 5%. 52 While isomorphism may be occurring among some news organizations, the low adoption rate shows little consensus or mimicking behaviors at an industry-wide level.
Each interviewee appreciated the potential compensatory function of QR to subsume print’s limitations of time delays, image sound and movement, and the amount of information available on printed pages. Yet the analysis showed that many news organizations do not use QR to its best “relative advantage” of sending users to deep URLs. As discussed in the literature review, QR’s niche-gratification advantage over text URLs is its ability to send users deep inside a website. 53 The analysis showed that in 259 instances, the only newsroom-controlled QR codes on a page went to a paper’s main site (222 instances) or to breaking news site (37 instances) that essentially duplicate a homepage’s content. Put another way, 46.9% of all newsroom-controlled QR codes sent users to content at unchanging URLs. Using QR to send users to a static, easily typed URL may serve readers the first few times they access content using a mobile device, but then they can bookmark the site (or add a direct link to a mobile device’s home screen) to find it quicker than using QR hardware/software. In these instances, QR becomes akin to a Rube Goldberg device—a difficult technological approach to performing an easy task. Further research might hypothesize whether these many links to simple URLs are a reason why many newsroom executives reported that few readers use the codes. Some news organizations have figured this out, because QR codes were much more likely to be used as URLs to link to video and photo galleries. Still, many papers fall short in using QR for its relative advantage; 42 (26.6%) of the 158 papers using QR for any purpose sent users to simple URLs controlled by newsrooms.
Discussion of homogenization between news organizations’ print and online operations, 54 and among news organizations, also informs this second finding. It can be argued that there is continued isomorphism of the gatekeeping function of print-centric organizations, in which news organizations assume that they serve the agenda-setting function by using design techniques to indicate what news is more important or less important. As more web users bypass front pages and go directly to content, 55 the long-held homogenized beliefs related to agenda setting are fading. That few newspapers use QR or a similar technology to send users online, and that most using QR do not link directly to specific content, may suggest a short-sightedness to these fundamental changes in the public’s information-gathering desires and behaviors. It also may suggest that some print-centric organizations are stuck mimicking their old ways, and the ways of peers, by focusing more on text than on images that are best accessed via direct links. It is a user niche that print may be able to gratify through QR, or perhaps a different technology, to remain relevant in this changing era of media consumption.
Limitations of this study include the use of the free “Today’s Front Pages” alone instead of or in conjunction with a service that offers additional front pages, such as the for-pay PressDisplay.com, which is more consistent in postings by papers daily and also includes many weekly papers. The use of front pages only was necessary to make the project manageable but could be a limitation, as some papers publish QR beyond the front page. Also, the small number of interviews limits their generalizability to the larger population of news organizations using QR. Future research should test the assumption that QR has a relative advantage over printed URLs or with other hypotheses that test audience use and perceived gratifications of QR. Future research into QR as an example of institutional isomorphism could include interviews with news executives who have specifically rejected QR, or stopped offering it, as well as QR-related decisions by advertisers and newspaper ad executives.
Despite these limitations, it is hoped this study is useful as it is the first to take a social-scientific look at QR use in newspapers. Its key findings—that (1) newspaper use of QR is limited, (2) newsroom use is more limited, and (3) nearly half of newsroom QR codes do not offer a relative advantage over textual URLs—provide a trailhead for future researchers and insight for the industry.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) declared receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the McNair Scholars Program for undergraduate students at the University of Alabama.