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By Emily Sargent
Harlan Enterprise

You may have seen a couple of weird looking circles floating around your newspaper lately, and I can promise you they’re not some kind of alienistic, newspaper-style “crop circle” for what it’s worth!

These nifty little quick response codes, more popularly known as QR codes, are actually being introduced into our paper by yours truly as a way to help you navigate our content more efficiently and creatively than ever before.

For some time now, I’ve had it ingrained in my noggin that print, your more traditional route for news and sports, is somehow separate from digital content, like the Enterprise website and even our Facebook page.

But the more time I spend generating content and engaging with readers like you, the more I find that is simply not the case. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.

During this short time of creating and using QR codes in our paper, I’ve found it to be beneficial to both of us: the reader and the writer.

Between all of the pictures, videos and links I wish I could share with you, there’s only a limited amount of space in our traditional newspaper to allow me to bring you content I hope you will enjoy and/or find important.

Online, however, there are an infinite number of possibilities where I can share with you incredible amounts of information and in a timely manner since our paper is only published once a week.

By using these QR codes, I can share even more pictures of an event that would normally be left out of the paper due to space, videos and links to government websites, like you’ve been seeing for COVID-19 information.

Something I found to be very cool, which is another thing I actually didn’t even know about, was that most of our smartphones are already equipped to be able to scan these codes.

If you’re an Apple user like me, simply switch over to your camera and aim it at one of our codes. You should have a little notification pop up at the top asking if you would like to open the link. Just click on it, and it will take you directly where you’re trying to go.

Another great thing is that there are a ton of apps you can download specifically for scanning QR codes. How awesome is that?

In a time where we feel isolated from each other, QR codes can help us feel connected in a way I never thought possible, especially when it comes to combining the best of both worlds.

Try it out below by scanning this QR code that will direct you straight to our Facebook page!