A regional daily newspaper’s coverage of a visit by Prime Minister David Cameron gained more than 4,000 hits in just two hours and 12,000 page views in total.

The Nottingham Post reported on last week’s visit by Mr Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg to the city – which came the day after the government’s spending review and received national media attention.

Local government reporter Delia Monk tweeted throughout the two hour event for a CoverItLive blog as the leaders met pupils at two schools.

And readers also tweeted questions for her to try to ask the politicians when they took part in a Q&A session with around 150 people.

Tom Pegg, digital publisher for thisisnottingham.co.uk, said: “Our local government reporter Delia Monk is just starting to build up a presence on Twitter, and this was a great opportunity for her to try using it for a live event of national importance.

“We plugged her @CouncilMouse feed into a CoverItLive blog on our site – not only because it’s an easy way of providing live coverage, but because it lets people get a discussion going based on the live report.

“We were swamped with readers chipping in – many of them with questions for Delia to try to put to Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg. The hits were great – more than 4,000 in just a couple of hours.

“It was so much fun that the next day we used another CoverItLive blog to ‘interview’ a local celebrity goat. Strangely, that didn’t catch alight in quite the same way.”