Best of the City: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of the City is and who runs it

Best of the City is the readers' choice competition run by Signal Akron, a local news publication serving Akron, Ohio. The program invites the outlet's audience to pick favorite spots for eats and drinks, making it a food-and-drink best-of ballot rather than a business-to-business award or a sports poll. Signal Akron hosts the vote on its own website at signalakron.org, so the ballot sits inside the newsroom's own publishing setup instead of on an outside contest service.

The contest's scope is deliberately local. Signal Akron's own announcement for the 2024 round noted that the finalists are locally owned and located within the Akron city limits, adding a wry apology to Swensons, the Akron-area burger chain, for not fitting that locally owned test. That framing tells supporters exactly what kind of business belongs on the form: an independent Akron establishment, not a regional or national chain.

The ballot page itself is titled Vote in Signal Akron's 'Best of the City' competition, and it opens with the announcement that the outlet is opening voting for its inaugural contest and asking readers to pick their favorite spots for eats. The program's fixed details are gathered in the table underneath this paragraph.

The dated facts: editions, the June 14 close, and what is unpublished

Two editions of Best of the City are confirmed. The first is the 2024 round, which Signal Akron described as its inaugural contest when it opened the voting. The dated fact attached to that round is the close: voting closed on June 14. The outlet stated at that point that it would add up the votes and start reporting on the winners, with results to follow in its coverage.

The second confirmed edition is 2026. Signal Akron's coverage of that round ran under the heading Best of the City 2026: Akron's top restaurants and food favorites, a winners report covering restaurants, coffee, pizza and more. Those two edition years, 2024 and 2026, are what qualify the program as annual in this reference, and a 2027 round would be the next expected run if the pattern holds.

Several details sit outside the published text. Signal Akron has not put the exact opening day of any round, the named roster behind its category slots, or any rule on how often a reader may submit the form anywhere on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The announcement text covers the invitation to vote and the June 14 close, and nothing in it describes a nomination phase, a prize structure, or an eligibility rule for voters. Those gaps are worth knowing before planning any support effort, because they mean the only fixed points on the calendar are the closes the newsroom announces in its own coverage.

How a supporter votes in Best of the City today

The mechanic is deliberately simple. Signal Akron's ballot page tells readers to pick their favorite places to eat, drink and be merry by using the form below the announcement. There is no bracket, no head-to-head round and no nomination stage described: a supporter reaches the page, works through the category slots on the form, names a favorite Akron spot in each, and submits.

Because the form lives on the newsroom's own site, the whole interaction stays inside signalakron.org. The supporter does not leave for an outside contest domain, and the submission goes straight into the outlet's own tallying process. After the window closes, Signal Akron adds up the votes and reports the winners in its coverage, as it stated when the 2024 round ended on June 14 and as it did again with the 2026 winners report.

For a business hoping to appear on that form, the practical target is the Akron reader. The finalists are locally owned places within the Akron city limits, so a supporter filling in the form should be naming an independent establishment inside the city. The category structure spreads attention across the food and drink scene, from eats to drinks to places to be merry, which means a single business typically competes in the category or categories that match what it sells rather than against the whole field at once.

How this ballot sits beside its Ohio neighbours

Best of the City is one of several Ohio best-of ballots in this reference, and its closest neighbour in the same market is the Akron Community's Choice Awards, another Akron program in the same vertical. Beyond Akron, the state field includes Best of Ohio, a statewide ballot, and the Best in Ohio Business Awards, which approaches the vertical from the business-award side.

The other siblings sit in Ohio's larger metros. Best of Cincinnati is that city's long-running alt-weekly readers' poll, while the Columbus market carries two entries: the CBUS Top Picks Community Choice Awards and 97.1 The Fan Pizza Madness Columbus, the latter a radio-station pizza bracket rather than a general best-of.

What separates Signal Akron's program from all of them is its combination of host and scope. It is run by a digital local news outlet on its own site, not on an outside contest service or through a radio brand, and its scope is food and drink inside the Akron city limits with a locally owned requirement. A statewide ballot such as Best of Ohio covers far more ground; a pizza bracket such as Pizza Madness narrows to a single food fight. Best of the City sits in the middle: a whole local food scene, one city, one newsroom, and a form that asks readers simply to name their favorites.

Strengthening support for an Akron business on this ballot

Because the ballot is a plain form on Signal Akron's own site, support for an Akron restaurant, coffee shop or bar comes down to how many local readers fill in that form with your name in the right category. The category structure helps here: a business only needs its natural slot, whether that is pizza, coffee or a place to be merry, rather than the whole field.

Signal Akron's published text for this program says nothing about outside help, paid pushes or voting software, so the newsroom offers no stated position to quote either way. What the outlet does state is the local test: finalists are locally owned and inside the Akron city limits. Any support effort should therefore aim at real Akron readers who can honestly name your spot, and should respect whatever submission rules the live form enforces when the next round opens.

The dependable plays are the ordinary ones: tell your regulars the ballot is open, share the signalakron.org form link directly, and make the category ask specific. A fuller playbook for public-vote ballots like this one lives in our guide on getting more votes online, and the service side is described on our award-votes page.