A funny thing happened on the way to the Internet Age: People stopped calling their local newspaper office to get election results.

Before the Freeman had a presence on the Web, I used to get dozens of calls at the City Desk on school district election nights from people who wanted to know if their district’s budget passed or failed and who got elected to the Board of Education.

This past Tuesday, when all 18 school districts in the Freeman’s circulation area held elections, I took exactly one call from a voter, a man in the Onteora district.

At the same time, though, a posting on our Web site that we updated throughout the evening as election reports came in got nearly 4,000 hits between 9 p.m. and midnight Tuesday, indicating to me that interested voters were sitting by their computers and frequently refreshing our list to see if results from their district had become available.

I kind of miss the phone calls and the personal interaction with our readers. But the time I’ve gained back as a result provides me the opportunity to give those readers what they apparently want these days: up-to-the-minute information on our Web site.