Election news coverage most interesting part of night… oh yeah, Thomas Steen.

Tonight Winnipeg settled in for a long winter and a third term for Sam Katz as mayor, but the events are unrelated as far as the research shows.

Winnipeg seems to be a city that doesn’t like change. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s easy to say considering that all incumbent candidates for city councilor won, along with keeping our old buddy Sam Katz.

But it’s the news coverage that attracts my attention.

At 8pm Twitter was already filled with people tweeting and re-tweeting election counts, and CBC radio went live, but the TV coverage was sorely lacking. Only Global National was election-active at 9pm, while CTV waited until 10pm, and CBC (channel 2) until 11pm. Being Erica was on at 8, so I understand why you couldn’t pre-empt.

Meanwhile, the web was the place to be. The Winnipeg Free Press went live at 8:30, and city reporter Bartley Kives was already tweeting voraciously.

I was Tweeting @theuniter throughout as well, which turned out to be good fun, and much less stressful than writing a story on-site like Kives did in addition to the Tweets.

And since when did ChrisD get enough cred (and staff!) to do live coverage?

Twitter was super active, with every major news centre in Winnipeg tweeting… even the Winnipeg Sun managed to post a link to their website.

On their site, “Vote 2010,” is a small tab beside “news,” while the advertisement for Awesome Co. (you’ve probably seen those election-like bus benches downtown) is the most prominent image.

Election coverage has always spurred news makers to come up with better, faster methods of reporting, and it’s obvious that Twitter’s greatest function is news reporting.

I should note that despite all this great, on-the-spot reporting, I saw no mention about school trustees until 10:30pm when CTV got around to posting the results.

Meanwhile, Thomas Steen raised some eyebrows and made everybody in the city whisper “Jets…” for just one moment.

Then he said that people have “no excuses for doing crime,” which I guess is tough to argue with ideologically, but grammatically deserved a few seconds of pondering.