The North Carolina primary was a big test for the Democratic presidential candidates -- as well as for all the state and local candidates down the ballot.

It also was an important test of The News & Observer's efforts to secure a broader audience for its election news by extending the coverage from the printed newspaper to online. The paper did more than it ever has to add value online to what readers could get from their ink-and-paper newspaper. If you didn't read the online edition on Election Day, as well as in the weeks leading up to the election, you missed a lot of information about the most important North Carolina primary election in decades.

What ran online that wasn't in the paper?

* A Fact Finder Web page that gave profiles of every candidate at every level, their positions on issues, where and how to vote and other election information. You could print out in advance a sample ballot for your precinct.

* Daily "Under the Dome" postings of inside political poop that appeared online but not in the paper. (Sometimes, that was a loss.)

* Video and audio recordings of political events, including a map on which you could click to see every speech by the presidential candidates from the towns they visited.

On Election Day, the offerings included video interviews with voters as they emerged from the polls, interviews with the two Democratic gubernatorial candidates and a videotape of Sen. Barack Obama as he worked the crowd at a downtown Raleigh bar. That night, you could watch online the victory speeches of Obama and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Bev Perdue.

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REPORTERS AND ONLINE NEWS PRODUCERS CHURNED OUT coverage throughout Election Day. Eric Frederick, online managing editor, figures his team did more than 100 postings of election stories and updates after the polls closed Tuesday evening. Under the Dome reporter Ryan Teague Beckwith was blogging in real time about election-related tidbits -- such as the fact that three proteges of state Senate potentate Marc Basnight won their party nominations for statewide office (Perdue, Kay Hagan for U.S. Senate and Walter Dalton for lieutenant governor.)

The online activity got results. The number of unique visitors to www.newsobserver.com on Election Day was up nearly 20 percent over the previous week. Page views -- the number of times any page on the site is clicked on -- were up 17 percent. The 577,986 page views compared with 403,000 for the last big election on Nov. 4, 2004, which was a general election, not just a primary.

Frederick said the online service's main contribution came before May 6. "I think we did a good job on election night," he said. "I think our most important function was before then, in giving people the information they needed to do their own research to make their decisions."

I asked readers about the online coverage, and much of the response was positive. Phil Kirk, former State Board of Education chairman, said he was out of state and used the site to keep up on the election. "I checked several other Web sites, and The N&O was the best in terms of providing statewide returns as quickly as possible after the polls closed."

Michael Salim of Cary said, "The N&O did a great job. There was a short period (maybe 15-30 minutes) when there was some HTML error on the page and it was not loading correctly, much of the page was blank and/or misaligned. Other than that, it was great."

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BUT I ALSO RECEIVED CRITICISM about the quality and level of detail in the online results, especially after you got below the statewide level. One reader looking for Durham County commissioner results said he found The N&O's online format difficult to navigate, gave up and went to the Durham County Board of Elections site instead.

Paolo Mangiafico, another Durham reader, said: "I found the elections results interface on your site to be pretty clunky -- lots of scroll bars, big type faces, not particularly helpful bar graphs, needing to page back and forth, etc. I ended up using the WRAL site to look at local results, since the layout of the results there was more compact and easier to move around quickly."

Frederick acknowledged that online results were difficult to navigate. That's because The N&O, instead of compiling its own numbers, linked readers to the State Board of Elections' Web site.

The state agency did an excellent job all night of rolling out numbers from around North Carolina, but its format was very difficult to use. I had to make six clicks to get the results of the referendum on the Orange County real estate transfer tax, which was arguably the most important vote there.

Another problem, as several readers noted, was that the online site didn't show precinct-by-precinct results, so you couldn't easily find out from The N&O site how your polling place voted on the presidential election.

The N&O used to report such results routinely in the print edition the day after elections. It took a small army of clerks, interns and conscriptees (I enlisted my daughter one year) to compile and enter all those numbers. Frederick said it's not a good use of limited resources for The N&O to make that effort any more, when the numbers are readily available from state and county election board Web sites.

"If it's available elsewhere, I don't see why we want to duplicate it," he said. The N&O can link to those sites, he said.

That makes sense, economically. But it also means that readers become trained not to go to The N&O Web site for a complete election report, which is not what I think the paper wants to do.

Correction

I misspelled the name of Joe Denneny, research manager for The Charlotte Observer, in last week's column.

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