- More than 80 sponsor firms signed up to support the service;- Access to the Iwate Nippo web site rose by 250% (roughly 2M hits)- Twitter followers jumped to 600%;- The circulation of Iwate Nippo, recovered (94.5% to 98.7%) and the market share also increased (54% to 58%);- The paper gained renewed trust from readers.

We created the world first 'Social Network Newspaper', 'Iwate no Te to Te'.

'Iwate no Te to Te' is a service where people in and outside of disaster areas can confirm each other’s support. Users can post messages from websites and share them through social media. Those messages are then printed in newspapers. These newspapers were delivered not only to homes all over Iwate Prefecture, but also posted on bulletin boards at evacuation centres.

In addition, the paper uploaded pictures of the newspaper itself and scenes of them being posted on bulletin boards on social media on the same day, enabling those who sent messages to see that their messages had reached people in faraway regions. This service rapidly caught attention, and attracted messages from all over the world.

When the Great East Japan Earthquake devastated northeastern Japan on March 11th 2011, many supportive messages were sent from around the world via social media, encouraging many Japanese people.However, communications were shut down in disaster-hit areas which needed those words of encouragement the most. The majority of people in this area were unfamiliar with social media to begin with. Therefore, many of the messages from around the world did not reach the disaster's survivors.Iwate Nippo, a newspaper based in the disaster areas, has created an information relaying system by blending the characteristics of both social media and traditional newspapers.