Best of the Beehive: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why 'Beehive' is the name, and what that means for who votes

Utah's official nickname is the Beehive State, a reference to industriousness that goes back to territorial days, and Salt Lake Magazine leans directly into it with Best of the Beehive. The name signals more than branding. It's a claim to represent the whole Salt Lake City market's community identity, not just a single neighborhood's favorite spots.

Sugar House, The Avenues, Millcreek, Holladay, Rose Park. Salt Lake City's neighborhoods split fairly sharply by character: historic bungalows in the Avenues, newer development pushing east toward the foothills, a working-class west side around Rose Park and Glendale that doesn't always get the same media attention. A readers-choice ballot naming itself after the whole Beehive State has to reckon with all of it, not just the blocks closest to the magazine's own office.

Compare that framing to Best of Utah, City Weekly's own program, which explicitly claims statewide reach across 464 categories split between reader votes and staff picks. Salt Lake Magazine's ballot, by contrast, is confirmed to cover Salt Lake City specifically, a narrower and more locally grounded claim even with a statewide-sounding name attached.

What the confirmed nominate-then-vote structure actually means for a business

Two steps, not one. Best of the Beehive runs public nominations first, then moves to a reader vote that decides the winners, a structure Salt Lake Magazine confirms without publishing exact dates for either phase. A business skipping straight to "vote for us" messaging before nominations even open is asking customers to do something the ballot isn't ready for yet.

Results run in the magazine's annual issue, print and digital, rather than a running leaderboard a business can watch update in real time. That's a real gap for anyone used to instant feedback: there's a wait between when voting closes and when Salt Lake Magazine actually confirms who won.

No category list, exact vote window, or cap is published anywhere in the public record. That's a real limit on what a campaign can plan around; the safest approach treats saltlakemagazine.com as the only authority once a nomination window is confirmed open.

Two publishers, two very different Salt Lake ballots

City Weekly's Best of Utah runs 464 categories and splits decisions between reader votes and a separate staff-picked track, with its own confirmed 2025 date of August 31. Best of the Beehive doesn't publish a comparable category count or a fixed calendar date, which makes it the harder of the two Salt Lake City ballots to plan a campaign calendar around in advance.

That's not exactly a flaw; it's a difference in how each publisher runs its program. A business entering both needs to track two separate nomination windows, two separate vote structures, and two separate results dates, since nothing here suggests they're coordinated on a shared calendar.

For the general mechanics behind any nominate-then-vote campaign, award-style vote campaigns covers ground that applies to Best of the Beehive's structure specifically, since the nomination phase is where a lot of businesses lose momentum before the vote even opens.

Building real turnout across Salt Lake City's spread-out neighborhoods

Foothill and Millcreek sit closer to the university and the eastern benches; Rose Park and Glendale run along the west side, closer to the airport than to downtown. A single generic "vote for us" message doesn't travel evenly across that spread. Not because any neighborhood cares less, but because the channels people actually use differ block to block.

Holladay and Cottonwood Heights, both technically their own cities bordering Salt Lake City proper, carry strong neighborhood associations and local social groups a business can reach directly rather than through a citywide blast. That's a smaller, more targeted list than "share on social media," and it's the kind of channel Best of the Beehive rewards, since nominations depend on real people showing up in numbers.

See the Utah contest hub for how this program sits next to the state's other readers-choice ballots, and how online contest votes work for the mechanics behind a push like this one.

Reading a Best of the Beehive win the right way

"Nominated for Best of the Beehive" is accurate the moment nominations confirm it; "winner" only becomes accurate once Salt Lake Magazine's annual issue actually prints that result. There's no live leaderboard to point to in between, so a business claiming a win before the issue publishes is stating something Salt Lake Magazine hasn't confirmed yet.

Utah runs readers-choice programs well beyond Salt Lake City too. Best of Davis County, from the Standard-Examiner, covers the suburbs north of the city, and Best of Southern Utah, from Canyon Media, covers an entirely different part of the state near St. George. Neither shares a ballot, a publisher, or a nomination window with Best of the Beehive.

Utah also runs sports-specific fan votes with no connection to any of these business ballots, including the KSL Sports Utah County Football Player of the Week and the High School on SI Utah Girls Athlete of the Week. A business owner following Best of the Beehive shouldn't assume any of those athlete polls share a platform or a schedule with this program. See is buying votes legal before committing budget to either phase.