Readers' Choice 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in Readers' Choice and why it matters in Maryville

Readers' Choice 2025 is the annual readers' ballot run by The Daily Times, a newspaper based in Maryville, Tennessee. It belongs to a familiar format in local journalism: the paper opens a public vote, its readers nominate and then support the local businesses, services and people they consider the best in their field, and the paper publishes the results as a community guide. For a nominated business, a strong showing is social proof from actual customers; for a reader, it is a way to reward a favorite spot.

The ballot lives on the Second Street platform, at thedailytimes.secondstreetapp.com, which is the same host the newspaper uses for the rest of its promotion calendar. That host also carries a pastor appreciation gallery, monthly first responder and teacher ballots, a weekly football pick contest and a groceries sweepstakes, so a reader who follows one Daily Times promotion will recognize the address and the interface of all of them.

The audience is the paper's own readership in and around Maryville. That gives the ballot a distinctly local character: the winners are decided by people who live with the businesses they vote for, not by a statewide or national panel. It also means the competition is concentrated, since every nominee is drawing from the same pool of daily readers. A program of this shape rewards the nominees who can turn their regular customers into daily voters, which is exactly what the organizer's voting rule asks for.

The 2025 dates and the program's edition history

The 2025 promotion was listed on the Second Street host as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot running from March 1 through April 30, 2025, and it is now closed. Within that listing, the organizer's own voting notice gave the finer-grained dates that mattered to voters: voting began on April 1 at 9am, and voting ended April 29th. The notice also carried the line that framed the whole campaign, "IT'S TIME TO VOTE for your favorites for the 2025 Readers' Choice Awards."

The program is not new. Confirmed editions of the Daily Times ballot run across seven years: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and finally 2025. Several of the earlier cycles are still reachable at their own addresses on the same host, including the 2019, 2020, 2023 and 2024 ballots. That unbroken stretch makes this one of the longer-running readers' choice programs among Tennessee newspaper contests, and it explains why local businesses treat a placement on it as an annual event rather than a one-time mention.

What the promotion listing does not carry is the fine print a strategist would also want. The Daily Times has not published eligibility terms or an overall vote ceiling alongside the daily rule; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The category structure for any given cycle is likewise something a supporter reads off the live ballot page, because the paper refreshes the promotion for each edition rather than keeping a standing rules document.

How a supporter actually votes on the Daily Times ballot

The mechanic is simple and deliberately repetitive. The organizer's notice for the 2025 cycle instructed supporters to come back every day and vote once per day per category. In practice that means a supporter opens the ballot, scrolls to the category they care about, selects their favorite and submits. The next day, they return and do it again in the same category. Any single visit can also cover several categories, since the once-per-day limit is measured per category, not per session.

For a nominee, this rule defines what an effective campaign looks like. A single announcement on the day voting opens earns one vote per supporter and then stops. A business that reminds its customers every morning, by counter sign, receipt, email list or social post, collects the same supporter's vote thirty times across the month. Under a once-per-day-per-category structure, the difference between those two approaches is enormous, and it requires nothing more unusual than consistency.

The literal sequence a supporter follows is short: open the promotion on thedailytimes.secondstreetapp.com, confirm the ballot is open for the current cycle, choose a category, submit a vote, and set a reminder to return the next day until the closing date. Whether the form asks for an email or any sign-in is shown on the live page, and that page is the authority on anything the notice does not spell out, including any per-category or per-person conditions attached in a given year.

How this ballot sits among Tennessee's readers' choice contests

Readers' Choice 2025 is one entry in a busy Tennessee field of community-vote programs. Within the state, a supporter might also encounter the Chattanooga Times Free Press Best of the Best, the CommunityVotes Chattanooga ballot, the Cityview Best of the Best in Knoxville, the Knoxville HBA Parade of Homes, and the BroadwayWorld Memphis Awards and BroadwayWorld Nashville Awards in the theatre space. Each answers to a different publisher and runs on its own calendar.

What separates the Daily Times ballot from those neighbours is scale and market. The Chattanooga and Knoxville programs attach to larger metro areas, while this one is anchored to Maryville and the paper's immediate readership, which compresses the competition into a smaller pool of daily voters. Its host is also worth a moment: because Second Street carries the paper's whole promotion calendar, the ballot sits alongside recognisable local fixtures such as the teacher and first responder monthly ballots, which keeps a loyal audience returning to the same address year after year.

For a nominee weighing which contests matter, the practical question is where their customers already read. A Maryville-area business will usually find this ballot the most direct route to its own base, while a business with reach across multiple Tennessee markets has reasons to appear in several of the programs listed above. The vote rules differ from program to program, so the once-per-day-per-category habit described here should never be assumed to transfer; each ballot prints its own.