Viva la Best Of!

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Are you ready for the state’s biggest, most accurate popularity contest? It’s time for RN&R’s Biggest Little Best of Northern Nevada 2011!

Man, do I have a love-hate relationship with this thing.

This year, our readers’ poll runs from June 9-July 28. Our plan is to publish the results on Aug. 11. Vote at www.newsreview.com/reno.

Not too many differences this year. In years past, we’ve emphasized certain sectors of our community—like Independent businesses. This year, we’re focusing a bit of our attention on the area’s Latino contributions. Got a preferred pupusa? How about a favorite mariachi band? Be sure and vote in our Latino section.

As always, our categories include almost everything under the sun, and if you can think of a category we don’t have, feel free to add it in our Freestyle section. For example, who really is the best gardener in Northern Nevada? If we like it, we’ll add it to our Biggest Little Best Of list.

We’ve got two other major changes this year: 1) We’ve increased the number of categories in our Casinos & Gambling section, and casinos are now only eligible in that section. 2) We’re only accepting one ballot per email address. When we started this competition, many families only had one email address. Neither Google nor Hotmail had been invented yet. That’s no longer true, and now many people have more email addresses than they can remember. So, in addition to our other filtering methods, we’re only accepting one entry per email address.

We, of course, recognize that this is a popularity contest, and that in order for the winners to be accurate, everyone who can must participate. We also recognize that a big part of the fun is the campaigning on Facebook, Twitter and with word of mouth. But beware, every year we come across people who attempt to cross the line from friendly competition to cheating, and we toss those entries—the entire ballot—out.