ArkansasOnline Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

Four Arkansas best-of ballots, and the one that says the least about itself

bestofthebest.arkansasonline.com. Arkansasonline.com/bestof2025/. Those are the two addresses behind the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's Best of the Best, and together they represent the readers-choice entry from the state's largest daily newspaper. That scale claim matters, because Arkansas already runs three other well-documented best-of programs, and Best of the Best is, oddly, the one that publishes the thinnest public detail about its own mechanics.

Put them side by side and the gap is obvious fast.

Two regional programs, run by smaller outlets covering Fort Smith and Jonesboro respectively, both publish nominee counts and vote totals down to the last hundred. The Democrat-Gazette, covering the entire state, has not, at least not anywhere this guide could confirm. That's worth sitting with before assuming "biggest paper" automatically means "most documented ballot."

Why the largest paper's ballot still matters, numbers or not

Circulation size is not category detail, but it is still a real signal. A statewide daily's readership is, structurally, a wider pool than a single-city alt-weekly's or a regional broadcaster's audience, and that pool is exactly who a Best of the Best campaign is trying to reach.

The tradeoff a nominee actually faces

More potential reach cuts both ways. A broader audience means more possible votes, but it also means more competing nominees statewide rather than a tighter regional field. Best of Northeast Arkansas draws from one metro area; Best of the Best, framed statewide, draws from all of it, Little Rock down through Fayetteville and Jonesboro alike.

Without a published category count or nominee list, a business or individual entering Best of the Best is, honestly, working with less information than a Best of River Valley or Best of Northeast Arkansas entrant gets. That's not a reason to skip it. It's a reason to check bestofthebest.arkansasonline.com directly rather than assuming the mechanics mirror a sibling program just because both papers share the Democrat-Gazette name.

What's confirmed here, and what genuinely isn't

Two URLs. A confirmed 2026 edition, open now. Business categories and separate people categories, meaning an individual can be nominated alongside companies. That's the complete confirmed record for this program at the time of writing. No public vote totals, no category list, no fixed close date sit next to those facts, and this guide isn't going to pretend they exist.

A business searching for how this ballot actually works deserves that honest split, confirmed facts on one side, open questions on the other, over a manufactured category list that reads well but can't be checked. The right move for anything not listed above is bestofthebest.arkansasonline.com itself, checked during the live cycle.

The two-URL mechanic, and what a people category changes

bestofthebest.arkansasonline.com is not interchangeable with arkansasonline.com/bestof2025/, even though both belong to the same newspaper. The subdomain is where a ballot lives and a vote gets cast. The year-numbered hub reads more like a landing page, background on the program, likely refreshed with a new year suffix on each future edition. A shared link pointing at the hub sends a supporter somewhere to read, not somewhere to act.

The people-category piece changes who can even enter. Best of Northeast Arkansas already nominates "businesses and individuals" under one umbrella of 215 categories, so this isn't unheard of in Arkansas readers-choice ballots. But it's worth naming directly here: a teacher, a local personality, a public-facing professional, anyone the Democrat-Gazette groups into a people category, competes on different terms than a storefront does. Confirm which type of category a nomination falls under before a single campaign message goes out, because a business-focused pitch aimed at a people-category audience misses the actual point.

For the general mechanics behind any readers-choice push, how online contest votes work covers ground that applies here regardless of which category type is in play, and award-style vote campaign guidance speaks directly to a readers-choice structure like this one.

Campaigning honestly on the state's broadest, least-detailed ballot

No fake accounts, no automated tools, no "we won" claim before arkansasonline.com's hub actually publishes that year's result. A program run by Arkansas's largest daily paper has every reason and every resource to catch manipulated activity, and the reputational cost of getting caught scales with how many readers that paper reaches.

Real outreach works differently here than on a regional ballot with a tighter, more local audience. A statewide daily's readers are spread across Little Rock, Fort Smith, Fayetteville, Jonesboro, and dozens of towns in between, so a single generic social post reaches a thinner slice of that audience than it would on a Jonesboro-only ballot. Naming the exact category, business or people, and the exact bestofthebest.arkansasonline.com link in every message matters more when the audience is this spread out.

A vote-promotion service, ours included, can help a nominee reach people who already know them, sent to the right link at the right time. None can promise a result the newspaper's own statewide readers ultimately decide. The question worth answering before any budget goes out the door is is buying votes legal, and for more Arkansas fan-vote and readers-choice programs, the Arkansas contest hub collects the rest, including the Arkansas High School Athlete of the Week and Arkansas High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week fan-vote polls, which run on entirely different mechanics from any of the state's best-of programs.