The Evening Leader ensured it reported the local election results first by ‘Twittering’ live from the region’s counts.

NWN Media Ltd’s Evening Leader used mobile phones and the micro-blogging website, Twitter, to keep their online readers up-to-date with the very latest news from the elections on May 1.

Senior reporter Mike Youds reported from the Flintshire count throughout the night on Thursday, May 1, finally Twittering his final report via mobile phone in the early hours of Friday morning.

A team of reporters then Twittered live from the Chester and Wrexham counts, while online readers could follow the election news on the Evening Leader’s Twitter profile at www.twitter.com/eveningleader or visit a specially designed page on the Leader’s website which had the Twitter feed, (pictured below), embedded in it.

Breaking news

Digital editor Christian Dunn said: “We obviously wanted to report all the election results live but we have the normal resource and technology limitations as most other regional titles.

“With Twitter though, one senior reporter using a standard mobile phone can keep an entire section of our site instantly updated with the very latest breaking news.

“This means that regional newspapers, like the Evening Leader, can finally break news just as fast as the big boys – even Sky and the BBC.

“Our websites, and services such as Twitter, really give us back an advantage – allowing local journalists to be at the forefront of breaking news.”

Deputy editor Martin Wright said: “We uploaded dozens of reports using Twitter from the three counts in our region and our live election news page was easily the most popular section of the website on Friday as the results came in.

“It was great for everyone in the newsroom to know that they’d been the first in the area to break the results and allowed us to concentrate on strong reaction and colour pieces in the next day’s newspaper.”