Fort Wayne A-List 2026 (989thebear): How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Fort Wayne A-List is and who runs it

The Fort Wayne A-List 2026 is a best-of ballot for the Fort Wayne, Indiana market. The publisher is WBYR-FM, the classic rock station known on air as The Bear, and Second Street, the platform company behind many radio-station contests, hosts it at the station's own subdomain 989thebear.secondstreetapp.com. The promotion sits in the business vertical: it invites the market's listeners to name and vote for local businesses rather than people or events.

The station's platform listing types this promotion as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot. That designation matters for how a supporter experiences the form: nomination and voting are stages inside a single promotion, so a category can move from accepting written nominations to accepting finalist votes without the supporter needing to find a separate second-round page. The mechanics are the platform's, but the rules are the station's.

WBYR-FM runs several promotions on the same subdomain alongside the A-List, including ticket giveaways, sweepstakes and listener-submission offers. The A-List is the station's best-of ballot among them, and it is the only one of the station's promotions covered on this page. The station's broader Fort Wayne group includes WOWO, per the station's own market identification.

Facts at a glance

The confirmed dates and what the station has not published

The dated facts for this ballot are short and firm. Voting opened on September 3, 2026 and closes on October 14, 2026. Both dates come from the promotion's own listing on Second Street, and the ballot was live and accepting entries at the start of that window. The window therefore runs a little over six weeks, spanning early September through mid-October.

Behind those dates: 2026 is the edition year the platform carries, and it is the edition year this page rests on. The program name reads like a series, and Second Street hosts multi-year A-List ballots for many stations, but for WBYR-FM's Fort Wayne ballot the platform proves the 2026 window and nothing earlier. This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

On the unpublished side, the gaps are specific. The station has not put out a category list ahead of the window, so which business categories exist and how they are named is something a supporter sees on the form itself. Nothing has been published either on per-supporter limits, on repeat visits, or on who may take part. Those gaps are common for radio best-of ballots, where the form is the rules document; for anything not printed above, check the ballot directly at 989thebear.secondstreetapp.com rather than trusting a number quoted elsewhere.

How a supporter votes on the ballot today

The literal mechanics are set by the ballot type. Because the promotion is a nomination-and-voting ballot, a supporter lands on one form that handles both stages. In a category still filling its roster, the form offers a nomination field where the supporter types a business name; in a category that has moved to finals, the form offers listed choices instead. The form itself decides which stage each category is in, so the supporter follows the labels on the page rather than a separate schedule.

Before submission, a Second Street ballot typically asks the supporter to register with an email address or sign in, so each entry ties to an identifiable person. That registration step is standard platform behavior for this promotion type, and it is what lets the organizer enforce any submission limits it has configured. The station has not published the specific limit it uses, so the wording shown at submission is the binding one.

The URL to use is the promotion's own address on the station's subdomain: https://989thebear.secondstreetapp.com/Fort-Wayne-A-List-2026. Going there directly keeps a supporter inside WBYR-FM's promotion. Inside the window, entry is free; the ballot charges nothing to vote and no payment step exists in its design. If the form offers a way to return on later days, that option appears at submission, and the confirmation message is the supporter's proof of what was accepted and when.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Fort Wayne's best-of scene has more than the A-List. CommunityVotes Fort Wayne Best Of also runs in this city, but it answers to a different organizer entirely, with its entries and its rules kept apart from WBYR-FM's ballot; that program is reachable at the CommunityVotes Fort Wayne page. A business nominated on one ballot gains nothing on the other: each program counts its own submissions only, and votes gathered on the A-List stay there rather than transferring anywhere.

Across Indiana, the sibling ballots are Best of Indiana at the statewide level, CommunityVotes Bloomington, CommunityVotes Evansville, YourChoiceAwards South Bend, and Best of Elkhart County from the Elkhart Truth. None of them shares WBYR-FM's ballot. What marks the A-List out in that company is its publisher: a radio station, with the promotional weight of The Bear's on-air audience behind it, rather than a newspaper or a dedicated best-of platform.

The second distinguishing feature is the window. The A-List's September 3 to October 14 run puts it in early autumn, and its nomination-and-voting structure means the ballot is active for nominations and finals within the same promotion. For a Fort Wayne business deciding where to spend supporter energy, the practical question is which ballots its customers actually use, and the A-List's case rests on the station's local reach in its own market.