Tennessean Top Pet Photo Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

The Tennessean's pet photo ballot: program, organizer and platform

Top Pet Photo Contest is exactly what the name says: an owner submits a photo of a pet, then the public votes for a favorite entry. The Tennessean, based in Nashville, runs it on the Second Street voting platform at tennessean.gannettcontests.com, separate from the newspaper's main news site.

Two editions are confirmed: an earlier one dated February 24, 2024, and the 2025 edition, whose full voting window is dated January 7 through April 1, 2025. That gives the contest a second consecutive confirmed year running the same submit-then-vote format.

That last row matters for an owner planning an entry. Beyond the dates above, neither a species breakdown nor a per-voter rule has gone live anywhere checked, so treat next year's shape as unproven until tennessean.gannettcontests.com actually posts it.

What two confirmed voting windows a year apart actually show

The 2025 edition's voting ran eighty-four days, January 7 through April 1, 2025, the longest confirmed window in this set of guides. An earlier edition is dated from February 24, 2024, though what's published doesn't spell out when that 2024 window itself closed, only that the contest was active from that date.

Line the two editions up and the contest's pattern looks like an annual run that starts somewhere in the winter and closes by early spring, without a fixed calendar date that repeats exactly year over year. 2024 opened in late February; 2025 opened over a month earlier, in early January.

What that shift means for planning ahead

Two confirmed editions with two different opening months is not enough history to call the January-versus-February shift a settled pattern. It does mean a pet owner shouldn't assume next year's contest opens on the same date as this year's. tennessean.gannettcontests.com is where that answer actually shows up once a new cycle opens.

The only pet vote among Tennessee's mostly business and theater ballots

Most of the other confirmed Tennessee reader-vote programs in this set rank businesses, prep athletes or theater productions, not a pet's photo. That makes Top Pet Photo Contest the outlier subject among its own closest neighbors in this set.

Six separate rulebooks, six separate results pages, and not one of them puts a pet's photo in front of voters the way this contest does. An owner typing "Tennessee pet contest voting" into a search bar is about as likely to land on one of those six, and none of them help an actual pet photo entry.

Building support for a pet's entry across an eighty-four-day window

Eighty-four days, the length of the confirmed 2025 window, is long by reader-vote standards, which cuts both ways. There's real time to build support, but there's also real time for early momentum to fade if a pet's supporters are only asked once, near the January opening, and never followed up with again before April 1.

People who already know the pet by sight, a vet's waiting room, a regular dog-park crowd, a next-door neighbor, convert into votes at a far higher rate than a single broad social post aimed at strangers. A contest still only two editions into its history has more riding on avoiding faked or automated activity than one with a decade of standing behind it.

Being entered is not the same claim as winning, and The Tennessean alone gets to make that second call once its own process wraps up. Is buying votes legal is worth reading before real effort goes into chasing a third edition. Buying votes online covers what paid outreach for a submit-then-vote contest like this one typically involves.