2025 Best of the Best North Nominations: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of the Best North ballot is and who runs it

The 2025 Best of the Best North Nominations is the nomination round of TribLIVE Best of the Best, the readers' choice awards program published by the Tribune-Review in Pennsylvania. The program sits in the business best-of vertical: readers put forward the local businesses and organizations they rate highest, and the favorites that emerge go on to a public vote. The ballot is a nomination-and-voting ballot hosted on Second Street, and the direct address for the 2025 North round is https://tribweb.secondstreetapp.com/2025-Best-of-the-Best-North-Nominations.

TribLIVE splits its Best of the Best coverage into five regions: Allegheny North, Allegheny East, Allegheny West, Allegheny South and Westmoreland. Each region runs its own ballot under the same publisher, so the North program answers to the Allegheny North market specifically rather than to the whole Pittsburgh metro area. The Tribune-Review's own about page states the scale plainly: from July 20 to August 3, readers have the chance to nominate their favorite local businesses and organizations across a broad slate of categories.

Two addresses anchor the operation. The TribLIVE Best of the Best site carries a copyright line for 210 Wood Street, Tarentum, PA 15084, and the Tribune-Review's headquarters are listed at 503 Martindale St., Pittsburgh, PA 15212. The table below gathers the fixed details a reader needs before touching the ballot.

The dated record: which editions ran and when the windows fall

The program is annual on the evidence of its own ballot pages: editions are confirmed for 2023, 2024 and 2025, each hosted on the same tribweb.secondstreetapp.com address space. The 2023 cycle left a nominations ballot, a vote ballot and a winners page, and the 2024 cycle left a matching set covering nominations, voting and winners. That shape, a nomination round followed by a voting round and then a published winners list, is the pattern each completed year has followed.

The 2025 North nomination ballot opened on July 20, 2025 and closed on October 6, 2025, with the nomination window itself running from July 20 to August 3 according to the Tribune-Review's about page. The ballot is marked closed, so a reader arriving at that address today is looking at a finished round, not a live one.

The next cycle is already scheduled: Best of the Best 2026 voting ballots for Allegheny North, Allegheny East, Allegheny Southwest and Westmoreland all run from September 3 to October 5, 2026, and the Allegheny North voting ballot sits among them on the same host. What the Tribune-Review has not printed anywhere on these ballot pages is a ceiling on repeat voting, an eligibility rule or a daily-return policy; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the Allegheny North ballot today

The mechanic is a two-stage public ballot. In the nomination stage a supporter opens the ballot, selects the Allegheny North region, and puts forward favorite local businesses and organizations across the categories on offer. In the voting stage the same Second Street host presents a voting ballot where supporters choose among the nominees that advanced. The 2025 North round ran as one combined ballot covering both stages under a single program name rather than as two unrelated forms.

Because the 2025 ballot closed on October 6, 2025, the live action right now is the 2026 round. The Best of the Best 2026 Allegheny North Voting ballot runs September 3 to October 5, 2026, alongside the East, Southwest and Westmoreland voting ballots on the same dates. A supporter who wants their choices to count in the North market casts them on that ballot inside that window.

The practical sequence is short. Find the current ballot on tribweb.secondstreetapp.com, confirm the region reads Allegheny North, complete the categories shown, and submit before the closing date. There is no separate account step published on the ballot pages, and the organizer's process involves no purchase. Anything about repeat visits, logins or per-day limits is simply not stated on the published pages, so the ballot itself is the authority a supporter should trust on the day.

Where this ballot sits among Pennsylvania's readers' choice programs

The Allegheny North ballot is one entry in a crowded Pennsylvania best-of field, and its closest neighbours are the other four TribLIVE regions. Allegheny East, Allegheny West, Allegheny South and Westmoreland each run their own nomination and voting ballots under the same Tribune-Review umbrella, with the 2026 voting rounds all scheduled for September 3 to October 5. A business in the North market gains nothing from votes cast on a sibling region's ballot, because the markets do not pool.

Beyond the TribLIVE family, the state carries several independent programs a reader might confuse with this one. Best of the 'Burgh covers Pittsburgh under its own publisher, while Best of Philly (Philadelphia Magazine) serves the eastern end of the state. Best of Berks (Berks County Living Magazine), Best of the Lehigh Valley (Lehigh Valley Style) and the Bucks County & Chester County Readers' Choice round out the set, and Erie Reader Best of Erie covers the northwest. Votes cast for any of those programs stay with them and never reach the Allegheny North ballot.

What makes the North program distinct within its own family is geography and timing: it is the region ballot for the northern Allegheny County audience, and its nomination round opens in July, weeks before the voting rounds that close in early October.

Strengthening a business's support in the North ballot

Support in this program is built during two short windows, and the nomination stage is the one businesses most often miss. A nominee who is not named in the July-to-August nomination round cannot appear on the voting ballot at all, so the first ask to customers is simply to nominate, early, in the Allegheny North region. The second ask comes when the voting ballot opens, which for 2026 means September 3 to October 5.

The Tribune-Review's ballot pages carry no published rule on outside voting help, so the safe posture is to mobilize real customers rather than to test the edges of an unstated policy. Ask in person at the counter, put the region name in the request so votes land on the right ballot, and time reminders to the voting window rather than spreading them thin. The methods that suit a nomination-then-vote format are set out on our votes guide, and the award-ballot specifics are on our award votes page.