Best of 2019: Staff Picks: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of 2019: Staff Picks poll is and who runs it

Best of 2019: Staff Picks is the year-end music ballot of WFUV, the New York public radio station that brands itself New York's Music Discovery. The programme sits on wfuv.org under the station's own masthead, complete with the station's membership, donation and events navigation, and the byline on the published page credits WFUV Staff. Unlike most ballots covered on this site, the vote is not delegated to a third-party contest platform: WFUV hosts the Listener Poll on its own website, at wfuv.org/bestof2019staff.

The format has two layers. The first is editorial: FUV DJs and staff narrow down the station's choice albums and songs of 2019, which is what the Staff Picks in the title refers to. The second is participatory: the same page carries a Listener Poll that invites the audience to vote for their own Best of 2019 picks, so the listeners' favourites run alongside the professionals' list rather than beneath it.

In the best-of vertical this is an unusual shape. The sibling ballots in New York on this site are place-based business polls, while this one is a music poll for a radio audience, statewide in reach because the station's signal and streaming audience define the market. The mechanical facts a supporter needs are compact enough for a table.

The dated history of the WFUV Best of ballot

The Best of staff-picks format is one of the longest-running ballots in this collection. Confirmed edition years run every year from 2000 through 2019, then appear again in 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026, with a small number of intervening years absent from the confirmed list. That cadence is consistent with an annual programme that has missed an occasional cycle rather than a ballot that appears sporadically.

The 2019 edition is the cycle whose details are printed on the live page still addressed at wfuv.org/bestof2019staff. Its window is fixed by a single published sentence: listeners were asked to vote for their Best of 2019 picks in the Listener Poll through December 13, 2019 at 11:59 p.m. EST. That deadline is the one day-level fact the station published for the cycle, and no separate opening date appears alongside it.

The ballot page stops short of finer rules. No category roster appears for the poll, nothing is printed about how often one listener may vote, and eligibility terms are absent from the published text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Nor has the station published the dates for the edition after the most recent confirmed year, so anyone planning around the 2026 result and waiting for the next ballot has no printed date to work from yet.

Two cautions follow from the gaps. First, because editions are year-stamped, the rules of the 2019 cycle cannot be assumed to carry into a later one. Second, the years absent from the confirmed list show the schedule is not guaranteed even for a programme this old, which is another reason to make the current live page, not the historical pattern, your source of truth.

How a supporter votes in the WFUV Listener Poll today

The mechanic is the simplest of any ballot in the New York set, because there is no nomination round and no platform login printed on the page. A supporter goes to wfuv.org/bestof2019staff, scrolls through the staff material, and reaches the Listener Poll, where the published instruction is to vote for your Best of 2019 picks. The choices are albums and songs, matching the staff layer of the page above the poll.

The published text gives two anchors for the 2019 cycle. The poll was framed as the station's own Listener Poll, hosted on wfuv.org rather than on an external service, and the deadline was through December 13, 2019 at 11:59 p.m. EST. Everything a vote needed therefore lived on one page of the station's own site, reachable from the masthead navigation or by typing the address directly.

What the page leaves open matters for anyone supporting a specific nominee. The printed text sets no cap on repeat visits, says nothing about whether an account or email is needed to submit, and does not describe what happens to ballots that arrive after the deadline. For a later edition the same gaps apply in principle, because the format repeats without the fine print being republished. The safest reading is that the current ballot page is the whole rulebook: whatever it prints about submissions, returning and eligibility is the operative rule, and anything omitted is a question for whichever page is current in an active cycle.

How this ballot sits beside the other New York best-of pages

This page is one of several New York ballots covered on this site, and the neighbours help show what makes it different. The siblings are place-based community polls: Best of Brooklyn, Best of Queens and Best of the Bronx cover boroughs, Best of Westchester and Best of Hudson Valley cover suburban magazines' home territories, and The City's Best, Best of New York City covers the city as a whole. Those ballots ask readers to name favourite local businesses in defined places.

WFUV's ballot answers a different question entirely. It is a music poll, run by a radio station for its listener base, and its geography is the station's audience rather than a county line. A merchant anywhere in the station's coverage area could in principle matter to its listeners, whereas the sibling polls would treat different parts of the state as different markets. The vertical is the same label, best-of, but the subject is recordings instead of merchants.

The structural contrast is with the host, too. Each sibling poll answers to its own publisher and usually to an external contest platform, while WFUV keeps the ballot on wfuv.org under its own masthead. For a supporter, that means the station's page is the single authority on categories, dates and rules, and the market's other ballots offer no precedent that transfers. Reading a sibling's rules tells you nothing reliable about this Listener Poll, and vice versa.