2024 Coast Weekend Photo Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

A coastal reader ballot and the newsroom behind it

The 2024 Coast Weekend Photo Contest is a public-vote photo contest run by The Astorian, the Astoria, Oregon newspaper published by EO Media Group. The Astorian also publishes CoastWeekend.com, the coastal publication whose name the contest carries, and the ballot serves that same Oregon coast readership. Readers do not vote on businesses or people here; they vote on photographs submitted by the community, in the UGCVoting photo format that Second Street provides for exactly this kind of user-generated contest.

The hosting platform matters for anyone trying to find the ballot. Second Street runs the full contest family for this publisher at eopubco.secondstreetapp.com, so the photo contest sits alongside the publisher's sweepstakes and Readers' Choice ballots under one organization page. The 2024 edition lived at its own address on that domain, which is also where the confirmed voting dates are written: the window opened on December 18, 2024 and closed on January 13, 2025. The ballot is closed now, and this page treats it as the most recent confirmed edition of a program with a longer history.

For readers comparing coastal Oregon reader ballots, the closest relation is the Coast Weekend Readers' Choice Awards, which comes from the same publication family but votes on businesses rather than photos. The table below pulls the confirmed facts about this photo contest into one place.

The dated history from 2018 to 2024

This is one of the longer-running photo ballots on the Oregon coast. Confirmed editions ran in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, seven consecutive winters without a gap. The earliest platform activity for the series begins on November 9, 2018, and each edition has lived at its own address under the same Second Street organization page, so the program's history is unusually easy to follow address by address.

The 2024 edition is the most recent confirmed run. Its voting window is the tightest dated fact on this page: it opened on December 18, 2024 and closed on January 13, 2025, which places the contest squarely in the holiday-to-new-year stretch that the earlier editions also favoured. The ballot is closed as of this edition's end date, and no 2025 photo contest edition appears in the publisher's confirmed lineup, though the publisher did run other photo promotions during 2025, including a separate dog photo contest in July.

What the history does not settle is the road ahead. The organizer has not announced a next edition year for this program. The gap worth naming plainly is this: The Astorian has published no dates, no entry deadlines and no rules text for the next round of the photo contest; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Until a new address appears under the organization page, the 2024 window remains the last confirmed fact in the series.

How a supporter votes on the ballot

The mechanic is the simplest kind of reader contest. During an open window, a supporter opens the ballot page, browses the submitted photographs and casts votes for the entries they want to see win. No login requirement, per-vote fee or nomination round is stated anywhere on the organizer's published pages for this program, so the literal action is: find the photo, vote for it, and follow whatever return instructions the ballot prints.

Because the format is UGCVoting photo, the entries themselves come from the community. That shapes what voting feels like compared with the publisher's Readers' Choice ballots, where the options are businesses. Here a supporter is usually voting for a photograph taken by a neighbour, a friend or a family member, which is why these contests tend to run on personal networks rather than on business marketing budgets.

The practical constraint during a live window is the rules text on the ballot itself. Second Street ballots display the limits the organizer sets, and no voting-frequency rule for this program is available on the organizer's published pages, so anyone planning repeat visits should read those instructions on the ballot page itself rather than rely on habits from other contests. The sequence below breaks the process into the steps a supporter actually takes.

How this ballot sits beside its Oregon neighbours

The Astorian's contest family is broader than the photo contest, and the same organization page carries a sweepstakes lineup and a Readers' Choice program. The nearest sibling by audience is the Coast Weekend Readers' Choice Awards, a nomination-and-voting ballot from the same publication that ran from January 8 to March 1, 2026, voting on businesses rather than photos. The dog photo contest the publisher ran in July 2025 shows the UGC photo format reused for a seasonal theme, which is how a newsroom stretches one platform across a year.

Wider afield in Oregon, the same state hosts a set of larger reader ballots that appear on this site as related pages: the Best of Portland awards, the Best of Eugene ballot, the Eugene Community's Choice Awards, the Bend Magazine Readers' Choice Awards and the Best of the Mid-Valley Community's Choice Awards. Those are business-voting best-of programs with different publishers; none of them is run by The Astorian, and none of their rules transfers to this photo ballot.

What makes this program distinct within that crowd is the format and the calendar. It is a photo contest rather than a business ballot, it runs in the December-to-January stretch, and its support comes from personal coastal networks. A supporter moving between these Oregon ballots should treat each one's rules as its own, because the publishers answer for their own pages only.

Strengthening support in this photo ballot

Support in a community photo contest comes from people who already know the photographer, so the most reliable work happens before and during the window: tell the people who follow your coastal photos that the ballot is open, give them the direct address, and remind them while the December-to-January window is still running. Because entries are photographs rather than businesses, a shared image travels well on its own, and a caption pointing to the ballot does the rest.

Regarding outside help, the organizer's published pages for this program carry no stated rule about purchased support, and no voting-frequency rule is available either. That makes the live ballot's own instructions the only authority worth citing while an edition is open. Readers weighing a purchased boost for an open round can read what is actually offered on our buy votes online page, and the general playbook for reader ballots sits in our votes guide. No vote service of any kind can promise a win in a reader contest.