Rapid City Journal Best of the Black Hills: How Voting Works & How to Win

Rapid City runs two Best-of ballots at once, and they don't talk to each other

Search "best of Rapid City" and two unrelated contests come back. One is CommunityVotes Rapid City, a Metroland platform running 120-plus categories through nomination then finalist voting. The other is this one: Best of the Black Hills, the Rapid City Journal's own multi-category contest, published under Lee Enterprises at rapidcityjournal.com/contests/. Neither organizer references the other. A business that assumes there's one ballot to win in this market has already missed half the picture.

The split isn't cosmetic. CommunityVotes is a national platform product licensed to Metroland markets across the continent, the same software running in dozens of unrelated cities. Best of the Black Hills is the Journal's in-house contest, tied to a physical newspaper masthead that predates any digital voting platform. One is a plug-in; the other is an institution running its own show.

That's not a knock on either program. It just means a business planning a Rapid City readers-choice push has two separate deadlines, two separate audiences, and two separate result pages to track, not one. See the South Dakota contest hub for both, plus the other confirmed statewide programs.

Why enter the Journal's contest instead of, or alongside, the other one

A subscriber base is not a website's traffic. The Journal's contest draws people who already read Lee Enterprises coverage of the Black Hills, city council votes, high school scores, tourism stories, which skews toward an older, more locally rooted audience than a standalone voting platform pulls in cold.

The region, not the city, is the real audience

Best of the Black Hills doesn't stop at Rapid City's edge. Sturgis, Spearfish, Deadwood, Custer, Hot Springs: all of it counts, because the Journal's own coverage area does. A Deadwood casino-district business and a downtown Rapid City law firm are technically eligible for the same contest even though nothing else about their customer base overlaps.

For the underlying mechanics of running any category-based award push, see award vote campaign planning, and for a category with an obvious Black Hills equivalent, restaurant vote campaign planning covers ground a Deadwood or Sturgis dining nomination runs into directly.

Single round, one page to bookmark, then a print wait

Unlike the nomination-then-finalist structure next door, this contest runs one public voting round. No separate write-in phase precedes it here. That's simpler to campaign around but leaves less room to correct a wrong category choice once voting opens.

A gap between voting close and results is common across newspaper-run contests generally; a small business owner used to instant platform-style results should build in that lag rather than expecting a same-week announcement. Founder-led operations, especially ones where a named owner drives customer trust, can also review the personal-brand vote outreach guide for reminders framed around a named principal rather than the business name alone.

Deadwood and Sturgis compete on the same page as Rapid City retail, and that's structural

A single regional readers-choice contest, run out of one newsroom, means a Deadwood gaming hall and a Rapid City chiropractor never cross paths on the ballot, wrong category, but a Sturgis motorcycle outfitter and a Rapid City outfitter can land in the exact same race. Category, not town, decides who a business is actually up against.

That structure rewards businesses that pick the category their existing customers already associate with them, rather than the category that sounds most impressive. A tourism-adjacent business in a small Black Hills town competing against a larger Rapid City counterpart in the same category isn't an accident of the ballot; it's the whole design. See what a genuine vote actually looks like for the standard that applies whether a category draws a handful of nominees or dozens.

No standing rulebook here either: read the current contests page

Lee Enterprises doesn't publish a fixed, year-over-year rulebook for Best of the Black Hills the way a single long-running mechanic might. Category names, the voting window, and any repeat-vote allowance can shift from one edition to the next, since an editorial team controls the format rather than a locked software template.

That has a direct consequence for what a business can honestly say publicly. "On the ballot" holds up the moment voting opens. A placement claim only holds up once the Journal's special section actually names it, category by category, since a regional multi-category contest has no single overall winner to claim. And because a second, unrelated Rapid City ballot exists under CommunityVotes, a business should always specify which contest a result came from, "Best of the Black Hills," not a generic "Rapid City's best," so the claim can't be read as covering a program it never entered. For the general mechanics behind any online contest ballot, see how online contest votes work.