There's no better place to be than in a newsroom on election night. Especially a presidential election night.

After months of planning, making staff assignments, carving out numerous pages of news space and developing an online presentation, Tuesday came down to execution and The Advertiser staff excelled at providing the most comprehensive election coverage in Hawai'i.

Every reporter here knows the election-night drill of writing up material in advance, waiting for the first round of returns, freshening their stories, filing for online and then doing it again as the second, third and fourth rounds come dribbling in, hopefully before deadline.

A few reporters and photographers start their day at various precincts, checking for possible voting problems and talking to voters as our online report starts to build. Others come in later and watch the early returns on television.

This year, the election of Hawai'i-born Barack Obama added to the excitement and made us think carefully about how to present the news online and in print the next day.

The biggest dilemma was not knowing exactly what our front-page image would look like. We knew we would go big with an Obama victory but we also had many other important local issues to display, from Honolulu mayor results to the rail vote to whether we wanted a constitutional convention.

Page One took many different looks throughout the night, including a rail story at the bottom of the page and a summary of the Honolulu, Big Island and Kaua'i races at the top.

But as the night drew on, the more it became clear that Obama and his breakthrough victory should take three-fourths of the front page with a local story by writer Derrick DePledge.

Next in importance seemed to be the rail vote, also historic whether it passed or failed. The mayoral races fell exactly where we thought they might with no upsets. The Constitutional Convention vote was a non-event and we expected the Democrats to take firm control of Congress.

Rail took a story spot on the top of Page One. The other topics merited short mentions in a bar above the rail story. We examined a number of Obama photos before settling on the iconic shot we used, and that contributed to our 10 1/2 pages of election coverage.

Our editorial page writers were preparing on-deadline opinions about Obama and rail while columnist David Shapiro provided his own unique summary of the night's events.

Online, we updated results throughout the day of national and local elections, including a state-by-state map of the presidential race. Shapiro conducted live blogging and answered questions but some of the comments were too inflammatory and we had to shut it down.

For the first time, we ran live video streams from the newsroom, where political commentators Gerry Kato and Jerry Burris were joined by Advertiser reporters and state Reps. Gene Ward and Kirk Caldwell as well as University of Hawai'i associate professor Ira Rohter. We also streamed live from the campaign headquarters of Mayor Mufi Hannemann and City Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi.

I look at all our coverage with a critical eye, but in the case of what we accomplished Tuesday and in the newspaper on Wednesday, I thought we captured history perfectly.

Mark Platte is senior vice president/editor of The Advertiser. Reach him at 525-8080. Or post your comments at www.honoluluadvertiser.com.