Best of Reno Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Reno's split identity decides who ends up on this ballot

Casino floors and ski lodges built one Reno. Tesla's Gigafactory and a wave of tech-sector arrivals from California are building another. Best of Reno, Reno Gazette-Journal's Community's Choice Awards, draws its ballot from a city that is genuinely two economies overlapping: tourism and gaming on one side, a newer logistics-and-tech corridor stretching toward the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center on the other.

That split shows up in who actually competes. A downtown casino restaurant with decades of regulars sits on the same 150-plus-category ballot as a business that opened after the tech influx started reshaping local demand. Neither side automatically dominates; the confirmed program description doesn't say which one wins more often, only that the ballot spans the whole Northern Nevada market.

Sparks, the Truckee Meadows, and the broader Reno-Sparks corridor all fall inside the program's stated coverage. A business doesn't have to sit inside Reno's exact city limits to be eligible, just inside the Northern Nevada market the paper actually serves.

150-plus categories, one confirmed shape

More than 150. That's the one hard number in Best of Reno's public description, and it says something concrete about how the ballot is built. This isn't a program with a dozen broad categories where one popular business sweeps several slots at once. It's built for narrow, specific competition.

No public vote totals or past-winner list appears in the sourced program description, so a business shouldn't lean on a prior year's result as settled fact. The category count and the platform are confirmed; actual turnout per category is not published anywhere checked here.

How the Gannett contests platform actually handles the vote

gannettcontests.com, not rgj.com. That's the detail a lot of nominees miss. Reno Gazette-Journal doesn't run Best of Reno on its own news site's infrastructure; it uses Gannett's shared contest platform, the same system other Gannett papers run their own local Community's Choice ballots on in separate markets.

That matters for a supporter trying to find the ballot fast. Staying on rgj.com alone may not surface the voting page at all. The actual 2026 address is rgj.gannettcontests.com/2026-Best-of-Reno-Communitys-Choice-Awards/, worth bookmarking and sharing directly rather than sending people off to search for it themselves.

Exact open and close dates for the voting window aren't stated beyond the 2026 label. Treat the live ballot page, not a prior year's schedule, as the only reliable source for current dates.

Turning Reno's newcomer and old-guard networks into real votes

A downtown business built on regulars and a newer business built on a tech-sector customer base need different outreach, even on the same ballot. Regulars respond to an in-person or email ask tied to loyalty. A newer customer base responds better to the channels it already lives in, which in Reno's fast-growing corridor increasingly means workplace chat channels and the social groups recent arrivals build for themselves.

Either way, the ask has to name the specific category. With more than 150 listings, "vote for us on Best of Reno" leaves a supporter guessing where to click. "Vote for us under [category] at rgj.gannettcontests.com" gets a vote cast in the right place the first time, not after a frustrated search.

Fake accounts or bot tools aimed at gannettcontests.com risk disqualification, and in a city where word travels fast between casino-district owners and the newer Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center crowd, real reputational cost too. See how online contest votes work for the general mechanics behind a legitimate push, and check is buying votes legal before spending a marketing budget on this ballot.

Best of Reno next to Carson City and Elko's own ballots

Northern Nevada runs more than one readers-choice program, and they don't overlap. Best of Carson City, run by the Nevada Appeal, covers the state capital roughly thirty miles south, a separate paper and a separate ballot entirely. Best of Elko County, run by the Elko Daily, covers a rural market some 280 miles east, closer to the Utah border than to Reno.

A business operating in more than one of these markets, a regional chain with locations in both Reno and Carson City, say, has to run separate campaigns for each ballot rather than assume one nomination covers both. The category lists, platforms, and voting windows aren't shared across the three programs.

For general campaign mechanics that apply across any Nevada readers-choice ballot, award-style vote campaigns covers ground useful beyond just Best of Reno, and contest vote campaigns covers pacing outreach across a large multi-category ballot like this one.