On February 1, the Hirakawa citizen's newspaper "Hirakawa Shimbun Newspaper" was published in Aomori and Hirakawa.

This newspaper was created by interviewing Hirakawa citizens about Hirakawa. The Hirakawa City Board of Education sponsored nine times a citizen reporter training course from July last year, and 15 citizens gathered through open call for participants learned how to collect data, how to write articles, and how to take photos.

Lecturer is Ken Kudo, a writer who works on the local newspaper "When, Things, Kotomeya Shimbun" and Hirosaki Keizai Shimbun. "Citizens themselves will have the opportunity to discover the charm of Hirakawa by discovering the charm of Hirakawa by reporting on it."

The newspaper is tabloid D3 size and has 4 pages. On the first page, a Japanese-French collaborative film "Swim too much night" starring in the Tsugaru region was featured, and elementary school student Horakawa Furukawa Kokara was posted with his family. Hirakawa's gourmet, hot springs, and Hirakawa natives, who delve into the architectural styles of youths and farmers who live in and out of the prefecture, and introduce the present and past of Hirakawa.

At the Hirakawa citizen reporter certification ceremony held on February 16, Shigeki Saito, director of the Lifelong Learning Section of the Hirakawa City Board of Education, said, "I will continue to publish it next year, so I will continue to send out the appeal of Hirakawa. I want it," and presented the certificate to citizen reporters.

Katsuya Ono, who became a citizen reporter, said, “By compiling the stories I interviewed into sentences, I became able to read the newspaper more deeply by knowing the difficulty of writing articles. If the Hirakawa citizen of about 30,000 people wrote, it would be 30,000. It will be an article on the street. I would like to cover more citizens and make it a newspaper that keeps drawers without throwing them away," he says with a smile.

The newspaper will be distributed to all households in Hirakawa city as a circulation board. You can get it at public facilities and shops in the city, and you can check it on the Hirakawa city website.