2025 River Cities Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the 2025 River Cities Best of the Best is and who runs it

The 2025 River Cities Best of the Best is a readers' choice awards program in the best-of vertical, published by WV News, a news organization based in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Unlike the statewide Best of West Virginia ballot, this program carries the Clarksburg newsroom's own market branding, the River Cities name, on a ballot built for the audience that newsroom serves.

The vote runs on Second Street, a contest platform hosting the entire wvnews.secondstreetapp.com domain. WV News registered the 2025 promotion with the platform as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot, which is the configuration that combines nomination and voting on the same form rather than splitting them into separate promotions.

Facts about the program

The ballot's own address is wvnews.secondstreetapp.com/2025-River-Cities-Best-of-the-Best, and a 2023 edition lives at a separate Second Street path under the same domain. Both belong to the same organization on the platform, which is how the two confirm each other as editions of a single program rather than unrelated contests that happen to share a name.

The dated record: which editions ran and when the 2025 window closed

Three editions of the River Cities Best of the Best are confirmed: 2023, 2024 and 2025. The 2023 edition has its own Second Street path, the 2024 edition is listed among the platform's promotions for the wvnews domain, and the 2025 edition is the ballot this page is named for. That makes the program a recurring feature of the WV News contest calendar rather than a single-run experiment.

The 2025 round has a fully dated window: it opened November 18, 2024 and closed January 8, 2025, and it is closed. That roughly two-and-a-half-month span in the winter is the most recent confirmed activity for the program, and it falls in the same late-autumn to early-winter part of the calendar as the platform dates shown across the editions.

What the organizer has not put out matters as much as what is confirmed. WV News has not published the ballot's category roster, nor any rule on repeat voting or supporter eligibility; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The nomination-and-voting structure is known from the promotion type, but the fine print that shapes a supporter's day, the sections on the form and the return rule, stays with the live page rather than any summary of it.

A 2026 round is not announced in this program's listings, so the next confirmed fact to watch for is a new promotion appearing on the wvnews.secondstreetapp.com domain.

How a supporter votes on the River Cities Best of the Best ballot

Voting in this program means using the Second Street form at the ballot's own address during an announced window. The 2025 form is closed as of January 8, 2025, so the sequence below describes what a supporter does in a live cycle, using the 2025 edition as the model for how the program is structured.

Because WV News set the promotion up as a Ballot/NominationAndVotingBallot, a supporter can encounter both stages on the same form: sections where a business name can be written in when no nominee is listed, and sections where an existing list of nominees can be voted on directly. The form drives the order, so the practical job is to work through the sections the page presents.

The per-person rule is the detail a returning supporter most needs, and it is not published for this program. Second Street ballots typically print their own instruction about returning, whether that is a daily return or a stricter limit, so the wording on the live page is what governs. Whatever that instruction says in the cycle you enter, it applies to every category on the form equally.

Submission is the last step: complete the sections you care about, send the form, and if the ballot prints a return allowance, come back on the schedule it states until the close date passes. The 2025 close was January 8, 2025, a pattern worth checking against whatever date the next edition prints.

How this ballot sits beside its West Virginia neighbours

West Virginia has a busy best-of field, and the River Cities Best of the Best occupies its own slot in it. Best in the Tri-State answers to the Herald-Dispatch, Best of West Virginia carries a statewide name, and The Dominion Post Readers' Choice belongs to the Dominion Post. Each program answers to its own publisher, and a vote cast in the River Cities ballot counts toward nothing else.

Three more neighbours round out the market: Best in the Valley from the Gazette-Mail, the West Virginia HBA Parade of Homes, and Best of the Ohio Valley from the Intelligencer. What distinguishes the River Cities program inside that set is its organizer: it is the only one here published by WV News of Clarksburg, and the only one hosted on the wvnews.secondstreetapp.com domain.

That domain also carries WV News's other promotions, including county-level best-of ballots and sweepstakes, so a supporter who lands on the River Cities page is on the newsroom's own contest hub. For a business weighing where to ask for support, the practical point is that each of these ballots is a separate audience and a separate effort, and this guide's own pages for award contests explain how support across such programs is generally discussed.

Strengthening support for a business on this ballot

Support in the River Cities Best of the Best comes from people who already know the business, so the useful moves are local ones: put the exact ballot link in front of customers at the counter, in receipts and in email, and name the specific section you are asking them to answer rather than sending them to the whole form. WV News has not published rules text for this program, so the only published constraint in a live cycle is the window itself, which in 2025 ran from November 18 to January 8. Ask early in that span instead of compressing every request into the final days, when a ballot's traffic is heaviest and a request is easiest to forget. A return allowance, if the live form prints practical vote-building tactics, applies to every supporter equally, so a steady cadence of reminders across the window beats a single late push.