I remarked to my girlfriend last night how useless the wire stories about Super Tuesday were each time I saw a new one pop up.

Every time a candidate won a state, a new story was released. Reading over the wire stories made me realize how inadequate the printed word is for election coverage on a day like Super Tuesday.

Why read over a bunch of text that is incapable of conveying the whole picture? Well, I won’t anymore when organizations like CNN, New York Times and others build compelling online features that do the job much better.

The NY Times feature blows my mind with the shear amount of data it has and how beautifully and elegantly it is displayed.

It’s one thing to know what percentage of the vote a candidate gets in each state or how many delegates each candidate gets, but it’s another thing entirely to be able to break the results down by county.

Missouri perfectly illustrates the power of this feature. Hillary Clinton won 119 of 115 counties in Missouri and still lost the state. Barack Obama won the state largely because he won 63 percent of St. Louis County and 55 percent of Jackson County — home to St. Louis and Kansas City, respectively.

I’ve been impressed with CNN’s election coverage for awhile too. It has given me a much better birds-eye view of the election than any written story. And, frankly, why do I need to read a new story every time a candidate wins a state, when I can look at a map showing me exact vote totals and, more importantly, delegate counts.

I also really like how CNN tracks the amount of money each candidate has raised, spent and has on hand. Money is very important to politics, and I’m glad someone is tracking where the money is.

Combine these two features with a political fact-checking site like Politifact and you have the perfect election coverage, which is infinitely better than a newspaper could ever deliver in print.

I love the written word. I’m a writer myself, but some stories are just told better in on other formats. Elections are one of those stories.