Chattanooga Times Free Press Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

How Chattanooga's Best of the Best stacks up against Tennessee's other readers-choice ballots

Four Tennessee newspapers run some version of the same readers-choice format, and no two of them work quite alike. Nashville Scene runs 200-plus categories from late July into late August. Memphis Flyer splits its ballot across six groups and prints results every September. Cityview Magazine's Best of the Best in Knoxville pulled more than 313,800 votes across 365 categories in each of its 2023 and 2025 cycles. Chattanooga Times Free Press's own Best of the Best, at bestofchatt.com, is the thinnest of the four on the public record; the one confirmed fact is a Facebook post stating that voting is currently under way.

That gap matters for anyone planning a campaign here. A Nashville or Memphis business owner can point to a published close date. A Chattanooga entrant, right now, cannot.

The name overlap between Chattanooga's and Knoxville's ballots is worth flagging on its own. Both call themselves Best of the Best, but they're run by different publishers on different domains with no shared ownership.

What actually separates bestofchatt.com from the rest of the field

bestofchatt.com. Not timesfreepress.com, the paper's regular news domain, but a dedicated address built specifically for this program, the same pattern Memphis Flyer (bom25.memphisflyer.com) and Nashville Scene (vote.nashvillescene.com) both use for their own ballots. That's a real structural signal: it's a standalone voting platform, not a poll embedded inside an article.

What's missing is everything downstream of that fact. Nashville Scene names six category groups. Memphis Flyer names six of its own. Cityview Knoxville publishes an exact category count and a multi-year vote total. Chattanooga's program, going by everything this guide could dig up, has none of that attached to it, only the Facebook confirmation that voting is open right now.

Guessing here would be the easy way out, and the wrong one

Guessing at a category list here would read cleaner than the truth. It would also be wrong more often than not. A business searching for how to vote in Best of the Best deserves the honest version: check bestofchatt.com directly for the current cycle's categories, deadline, and any vote cap, because none of those three things are confirmed anywhere else.

Reading the one confirmed fact for what it's worth

A Facebook post. That's the entire public record beyond the organizer's name and domain: Chattanooga Times Free Press posted that voting is under way for Best of the Best. It's a small fact, but it's a real one, and it does two things a guessing game couldn't. It confirms the program is live in the current cycle, not dormant or discontinued. And it confirms the domain, bestofchatt.com, is the right place to look, not a stale mirror or an outdated URL.

What it does not confirm is anything about scale. No vote count. No category breakdown. No entrant list. Compare that to Cityview's Best of the Best in Knoxville, where two full cycles of vote totals are public, or to Memphis Flyer's Best of Memphis, where the category groups are named outright. Chattanooga's entrants are working with less information, and any campaign plan here should account for that rather than borrow assumptions from a better-documented sibling program.

How Best of the Best differs from Tennessee's prep-sports fan polls

Best of the Best is a business readers-choice award, not an athlete vote. Tennessee also runs weekly sports polls with real structural quirks of their own: the Knoxville News Sentinel Athlete of the Week, produced by the paper's PrepXtra brand under Gannett, closes on Friday afternoons and caps supporters at one vote per hour per device. The Nashville Tennessean's Ponce Law-sponsored Boys Athlete of the Week runs that same hourly cap but closes Thursday at noon instead.

None of that connects to Chattanooga Times Free Press or bestofchatt.com. A campaign built around fan-poll mechanics, hourly caps, Thursday-versus-Friday closes, won't transfer cleanly to a business readers-choice ballot where the entrant is a company, not a teenager, and the confirmed mechanic is a single Facebook post rather than a published weekly cadence. Businesses running both types of local campaigns in the same market should treat fan-poll vote campaigns and readers-choice pushes as genuinely different playbooks.

Campaign planning across Chattanooga's own neighborhoods

Downtown Chattanooga, the North Shore across the Walnut Street bridge, and Southside near the Choo Choo are the city's most walkable commercial pockets, and a business in any of them competes on whatever category bestofchatt.com eventually assigns it. St. Elmo sits at the base of Lookout Mountain. Red Bank, East Brainerd, Hixson, and East Ridge round out the wider metro's suburban retail corridors, all presumably eligible, though eligibility rules themselves are a question for bestofchatt.com, not something spelled out in anything this guide dug up.

What a Chattanooga entrant can control right now, before categories or deadlines are confirmed, is making sure real customers know the program exists and where to find it. That's a narrower task than running a full turnout push against a countdown clock. Award-style vote campaigns covers the general mechanics that apply once bestofchatt.com does publish a per-entry ballot link, and is buying votes legal is a page worth reading in full before any budget goes toward a local readers-choice push, in Chattanooga or otherwise. For the wider state landscape, the Tennessee contest hub lists the other Tennessee programs with more of their public record already confirmed.