Paducah Sun Readers' Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

20,600 nominations, one region, five categories

Paducah Sun Readers' Choice Awards is an annual nominate-then-vote contest run by The Paducah Sun, part of Paxton Media Group, on the SecondStreet ballot platform. The 2025 cycle logged more than 20,600 nominations across Retail, Food, Service, Health, and Home categories for businesses in the Jackson Purchase region of western Kentucky, with voting closing in late May.

That nomination count is the number worth sitting with. Twenty thousand six hundred write-ins is a lot of reader effort for a ballot that covers roughly eight counties, not a whole state. It says something about how much weight a local best-of title still carries in a market this size, where a diner or a clinic can genuinely be a household name rather than one option among thousands.

What isn't public is a category-by-category winners archive going back through prior cycles. So this page won't invent one. See the Kentucky contest hub for how a regional newspaper ballot like this one sits alongside the state's other readers-choice and fan-vote programs.

Five categories, and the write-in round decides who's even eligible

Retail. Food. Service. Health. Home. Those are the confirmed groups the Paducah Sun ballot runs across, and the nomination round, not the vote, is what actually filters who reaches the finalist list in each one.

The category a business picks sticks for the whole cycle

A family clinic and a med spa both technically fit under Health. But if the community already thinks of a business a certain way, nomination volume follows that existing perception, not whichever label sounds broadest on the form. Guess wrong at the nomination stage and there's no fixing it once the finalist ballot goes live.

For the broader mechanics behind any nominate-then-vote award push, see award-style vote campaigns, and for the annual-recognition angle specifically, best business of the year voting covers similar nomination-round groundwork. Restaurants and diners weighing the Food category specifically can also check restaurant vote campaign guidance, which covers timing customer reminders across a two-stage ballot much like this one.

Plan around late May, not around the nomination form

Most of the effort on a ballot like this happens before anyone sees a vote button. By the time the finalist list appears, the outcome is already half-decided by who got nominated.

A business used to a single-stage city poll can easily underrate the write-in round here, treating it as a formality before the "real" vote. On a 20,600-nomination ballot, it isn't. General real-voter campaign guidance covers pairing organic reminders with paid reach across a two-stage structure before the late-May window closes, not during the final scramble.

What a reminder needs, and what the Jackson Purchase audience actually reads

Award name, category, business name, where to vote. Four pieces of information. Anything longer loses a reader mid-scroll, especially on a community paper's site rather than a national platform.

The Paducah Sun's audience skews local and civic-minded, reading for community news first. A hype-heavy reminder competes badly against that. A plain one, repeated a few times across the voting window, tends to outperform a single loud launch post.

One message when voting opens, a mid-window nudge, and a tighter final call as late May approaches covers most of what a small or mid-size Jackson Purchase business needs. Businesses whose following centers on an owner or a known local personality can also check influencer vote outreach guidance for compliant ways to fold that visibility into a reminder without overstating it.

Paducah anchors the region, but Murray and Mayfield aren't afterthoughts

McCracken County's population gives Paducah businesses a real head start on raw nomination volume. That's not the whole story, though. Murray, in Calloway County, carries a dense alumni and community network tied to Murray State. Mayfield, in Graves County, rebuilt a tight civic identity after the December 2021 tornado, and that community cohesion shows up in how readers vote for local businesses now.

None of these towns are official contest divisions; SecondStreet's ballot runs by category, not by city. But a Fulton hardware store and a downtown Paducah boutique are not pulling from the same customer pool, even inside the same Retail category, and outreach should follow that reality rather than the map alone. A region-locked ballot like this behaves differently from a statewide nominate-then-vote program such as Best of New Jersey, where the finalist pool spans an entire state instead of eight counties.

Running a compliant campaign on a community-paper ballot

Start from whatever rule is posted on the live paducahsun.secondstreetapp.com page for the current cycle. Nothing else, including last year's screenshot, outranks it.

What's off-limits is short and specific: fake accounts, scripted or automated entries, and calling a business a "winner" before The Paducah Sun says so. A community newspaper poll like this one runs almost entirely on trust between the paper and its readers, and that trust is worth more to a local business long-term than one category badge.

If a Jackson Purchase business wants help turning genuine customer attention into compliant vote activity, that's a fair question for a promotion service, ours included. Our vote-buying overview lays out where that help stops and SecondStreet's own rules start. No honest service promises a category win on a ballot that drew 20,600 nominations from readers who don't work for anyone selling votes.