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Nothing beats covering an election.

They can be defining events for a news organization. Unlike with sports, where the athletes don’t need the media to tell them the score, in politics, the players — the politicians who’ve worked for months — end up relying on the media to find out their fate. If you don’t believe me, check out the photo I’ve included with this article that shows Mayor-elect Peter Carlisle and his team getting the results Saturday night from Civil Beat.

Reporter-Host Adrienne LaFrance was showing them the numbers on our website at Carlisle’s headquarters before they were broadcast on TV.

The primary election Saturday was our first big election at Civil Beat, and I was so proud of our team.

A few highlights I hope you didn’t miss:

• We told the story of the day and the night in a live blog. That meant we were constantly updating a single stream of observations, news, numbers, anecdotes and color from our reporters spread around the city. One thing cool about this blog was the way readers, such as Ian Kitajima, contributed. We’ll do more of that in the future.

Live Blog: 2010 Primary Election

• Photographers John Hook and Gregory Yamamoto spent the day trailing the two Democratic governor candidates, Neil Abercrombie and Mufi Hannemann, to give readers a sense of the emotional arc of their experience, from hope and energy in the morning, to victory and defeat in the evening. Look for more in-depth visual storytelling in the future.

SLIDE SHOW The Final Day: Smiles Rain Down on Neil Abercrombie
SLIDE SHOW The Final Day: No Gold at End of Rainbow for Mufi Hannemann

• We were among the first news organizations to use a new mobile video streaming service application, offered by . This meant that reporters in the field, and in the office, sent live video directly onto the Internet where our audience was watching. We’ll do more of that, too.

• Data is obviously critical to election coverage. Our Randy Ching and Michael Levine teamed up not only to provide you with instant results, but also to take a closer look at the numbers, breaking them down by neighborhood, seeing where candidates performed well and where they performed poorly.

Voters Snooze Through Gov Primary, Mayor Race
Aina Haina Had Highest Turnout, West Maui the Lowest
In Special, Carlisle Dominated Honolulu’s Republican Regions
Geographical Analysis of Abercrombie’s Blowout Shows Hannemann Even Lost his Beloved Kalihi
Running the Numbers on Conventional Thinking

• We never let up on our commitment to Fact Check the words of our leaders. As soon as the governor candidates started talking after their victories, we were back on the job.

Abercrombie: “We Did Well in Republican Areas”
Aiona: Republicans on the Rise

We learned a lot from our election experience and will try to apply those lessons to our coverage in November. If you’ve got any suggestions for how we could improve our election report, please let me know.