A Northern Ireland daily published an edition on Sunday for the first time since the late 1990s to ensure it could report fully from the results of the elections.

The Belfast-based News Letter produced a special edition on the results of the elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Editor Darwin Templeton said the Sunday edition was originally planned because it was thought there would be a number of seats still to be decided on Saturday morning – but delays with the counts meant most results were not in until then.

He said the paper managed to get the results from 105 out of 108 seats in the special edition, pictured below, after putting back its deadline on the Saturday evening.

Darwin said: “We originally planned the edition because we thought that there would be a number of seats still to be decided on the Saturday morning, but as it turned out, as a result of the well-publicised difficulties at the count, the vast majority of seats ran until Saturday.
 
“This was fortunate for us, but made for a frantic day on Saturday and we had to push back our deadlines to get 105 of the 108 seats.

“We did manage to pick up the main stories including Peter Robinson’s emotional speech at the east Belfast declaration in which he dedicated his election triumph to murdered police officer Ronan Kerr.
 
“The fact that the broadcasters were unable to run any special programmes on Saturday night also helped to generate interest on Sunday morning, as did the fact that we had the chance to include reports from football’s Irish Cup final.
 
“It was a superb effort from the team and although we have had no figures for sales as yet, we have been pleasantly surprised by the very positive feedback from all quarters.”