LA Weekly Best of Los Angeles: How Voting Works & How to Win

Koreatown doesn't compete with Venice, and that's the whole design

Ask a shop owner in Silver Lake what LA Weekly Best of Los Angeles is, and you'll get a shrug about "the readers' poll" before anything about mechanics. That's the right instinct. Twelve-plus neighborhoods, more than 200 categories, one citywide ballot, the scale is the story here, not the voting form. LA Weekly, a Los Angeles alt-weekly running this program for multiple decades, splits the city's businesses into lanes narrow enough that a ramen counter in Koreatown never has to out-poll a surf shop on the Venice boardwalk. They land in different subcategories entirely.

That's deliberate, and it's also the single most useful thing a new entrant misreads. People assume "citywide" means one undifferentiated free-for-all. It doesn't. Voting happens at readerschoice.laweekly.com, and the category structure (not the whole city) is the actual battleground.

Los Angeles isn't the only city running this format. New York has its own version at the Best of New York City awards, and within California there's a whole tier of programs above and below LA Weekly's, so check the California contest hub and the wider USA contest index for how they stack up.

Twelve neighborhoods, twelve different supporter pools

Downtown LA. Hollywood. Silver Lake. Echo Park. Koreatown. Venice. Santa Monica. Culver City. Highland Park. Los Feliz. San Fernando Valley. Long Beach. None of these are official contest divisions; LA Weekly's ballot doesn't segment by neighborhood at all. But they're where the actual votes come from, and a Highland Park coffee shop's regulars look nothing like a Long Beach clinic's patient list.

A Downtown LA restaurant and a Santa Monica boutique both reach "Los Angeles voters," technically. In practice, a Downtown crowd skews toward nightlife and after-work foot traffic; Santa Monica pulls from visitors who may not even know the ballot exists yet. So the message has to travel differently, even inside the same 200-category ballot.

None of this makes LA Weekly special among LA-area readers'-choice programs. LA Magazine's Best of LA, LA Daily News Readers' Choice, San Gabriel Valley Readers' Choice, South Bay Readers' Choice, and Inland Empire Readers' Choice all run the same basic idea with different ballots. What makes LA Weekly's version worth a business's time is simply its reach and its age.

The ballot has no confirmed dates, and that's worth planning around

LA Weekly runs Best of Los Angeles annually. This page won't invent an open or close date for the current cycle, because none is confirmed here, check readerschoice.laweekly.com directly before you print a QR card or schedule a final-day email. Guessing a deadline and missing it by a week is a worse outcome than admitting the date isn't fixed yet.

What is worth planning is the shape of the window, not its exact dates. Voting opens; there's a middle stretch; there's a close. Pre-work (picking the right subcategory, standardizing how the business name appears everywhere) has to happen before any of that, because direct online voting, unlike a two-stage nominate-then-vote format, means the moment the ballot opens is the moment outreach should already be live.

Businesses building their first readers'-choice push can review how real vote campaigns work before the ballot even opens, so materials exist on day one instead of getting drafted mid-window under pressure.

What a supporter needs is four facts, not a pitch

Voting happens entirely online at readerschoice.laweekly.com. No confirmed per-day or per-email vote cap exists for this program on the record here, so treat whatever the live ballot states as the real rule, not a number repeated across some reseller's landing page. For the general mechanics behind online contest voting, see how online votes work.

The best reminder a business sends is short. Award name. Category. Business name. Where to vote. That's it. Don't make a supporter hunt across 200+ categories when four facts get them to the right ballot line in ten seconds.

A workable cadence: a launch message the day voting opens, a steady mid-window reminder, then a tighter push once the close date is actually confirmed. Multi-location businesses can split messaging by neighborhood (Highland Park customers get Highland Park framing) while keeping the ballot instruction itself identical everywhere.

Running a campaign without turning it into a bot race

Build the campaign around whatever rules readerschoice.laweekly.com publishes for the live cycle, full stop. The goal is making it easy for people who already like the business to vote, not manufacturing volume that isn't real. No fake accounts. No scripted submissions. No "winner" language before LA Weekly says so.

One honest note on paid help: a service, ours included, can widen reach among people with a real connection to the business. It cannot and should not promise a category win, see the award voting campaign guide for where that line sits in practice.

Why this page won't name a winner

No verified winners dataset for LA Weekly Best of Los Angeles is published on this page, on purpose. Best-of results circulate as old PDFs, plaques, screenshots, and reseller claims that often don't hold up against the actual current-year category. The only reliable source is LA Weekly's own published result, for the specific year and category in question.

Checking a competitor's claim? Get the exact year, the exact category name, and confirm it's published, not implied. Promoting your own result? "Best of Los Angeles [year] winner in [exact category]" reads as real; "LA's best" with no year or category reads as a stretch, because it is one.

Before results post, "nominated" and "vote for us" are the honest words. LA Weekly's citywide reach means a sloppy claim travels fast, and so does the correction when someone checks it.