Boston Globe Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two Massachusetts 'best of' guides, two different selection methods

bostonglobe.com/magazine/boston-best is not a ballot page. That's the detail worth sitting with before anything else, because a reader arriving from a search for "Boston best of" voting is likely expecting one. Boston Globe Magazine's Best of the Best is journalist-selected, with reader engagement factored into how winners get chosen, not a click-to-vote tally a business can watch move.

This site also covers Boston Magazine's separate program at the same market level, and the two work differently enough that conflating them causes real confusion for a business planning outreach.

A second site guide, Best of Boston (Boston Magazine), digs into that reader-poll program's 2025 numbers directly, including a category decided by roughly a ten-point margin. None of that public-vote detail carries over to the Globe's program covered here; it's a genuinely different mechanic under a similar name. For the wider Massachusetts contest landscape this site tracks, see the Massachusetts hub.

When editorial selection matters more than a vote count, and when it doesn't

A public poll rewards whoever mobilizes the most supporters before a deadline. A journalist-selected feature rewards something else entirely, whatever the writers and editors judging entries actually notice and choose to include. Best of the Best sits in the second camp, and that changes what "trying to win" even means here.

Why that distinction is worth stating plainly

No vote total exists for this program to move, so any pitch built around "get out the vote" tactics misunderstands the mechanic. Reader engagement is part of the process Globe Magazine describes, but engagement is not the same thing as a countable ballot, and treating it as one risks promising a business something the program was never built to deliver.

That's also the honest legal answer here. There's nothing to game because there's no tally to game; see is buying votes legal for how that reasoning applies to fan-vote polls generally, a category this particular feature falls outside of.

What the 2026 lineup actually adds: 28 categories, 300+ choices, and a Cape Cod line

28. That's the confirmed category count for the 2026 Best of the Best. Inside those 28 categories sit more than 300 individual choices, a scale that puts this feature well beyond a single-city readers' poll in scope.

The Cape Cod dining addition is the one confirmed geographic expansion for 2026, and it says something about where Globe Magazine's editors see reader interest growing. A restaurant weighing whether that new category applies to it should read it as one line inside the 28-category structure, not proof every category now covers the whole state equally. Businesses in the food and beverage space more broadly may find the restaurant vote-campaign guide useful background, even though the campaign mechanics it describes apply to public-ballot restaurant polls, not to this journalist-selected feature.

The mechanics Boston Globe Magazine has published, and the ones it hasn't

Confirmed: 28 categories, 300+ choices, a new Cape Cod dining line, journalist selection with reader engagement, and a June 7, 2026 publication date. Still missing from everything reviewed: a nomination-form URL, a vote cap (there's no vote to cap), and a per-category breakdown of how many entries each slot draws.

That gap is worth naming rather than papering over. A business searching for "how to vote Boston Globe Best of the Best" is, strictly, searching for something the program doesn't offer in that form. Compare that to how Massachusetts handles its high school sports fan votes: the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week ballot and the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week poll are both open public votes with real ballot pages, run by entirely different organizers under an entirely different mechanic. Both exist in the same state; neither one describes how Best of the Best actually works.

So the practical takeaway is short: treat bostonglobe.com/magazine/boston-best as the single source for this cycle's category list, engagement window, and edition date, and don't import assumptions from a public-vote program just because the name sounds similar.

What a Massachusetts business can legitimately do around Best of the Best

Build the reputation the editors would actually notice. That's a less satisfying answer than "click here to vote," but it's the accurate one for a journalist-selected feature. Real customer reviews, consistent quality, and visibility in the community Globe Magazine's writers cover are the inputs that plausibly matter here, not a mobilized click count.

Reader engagement, whatever specific form it takes this cycle, is worth participating in honestly once Globe Magazine opens that channel. It isn't worth overstating to customers as "vote for us," since that language describes a different kind of contest entirely. General campaign mechanics for programs that do run an open ballot are covered in how online contest votes work and the award-vote campaign guide, useful reading for the many Massachusetts programs on this site that do use a public tally, just not for Best of the Best itself.

As of 2026, the honest pitch to a customer is simple: "We're one of 300+ choices across 28 Best of the Best categories, including the new Cape Cod dining line, and we'd appreciate you telling Boston Globe Magazine why." Nothing more specific than that can be claimed responsibly without a published mechanic to point to.