Online voting for Outside’s Best Town Ever:
Chattanooga 7,434
Tucson, Ariz. 5,925
Charleston, S.C. 2,251
Boulder, Colo. 1,701
Ashland, Ore. 1,154
Burlington, Vt. . 786
Madison, Wis. 750
Portland, Maine 704
Portland, Ore. 685
Santa Fe, N.M. 585
Chattanooga has won the online voting component of Outside magazine’s “Best Town Ever” contest for 2011.
With voting now closed on a Facebook page, Chattanooga beat second-place Tucson, Ariz., by 1,509 votes.
Still, Chattanoogans must wait until early September to learn if the city is the ultimate winner of the contest because there are other elements to the judging.
“The winner won’t be announced until the October issue of Outside magazine hits the newsstands,” Jada Williams, the magazine’s publicist, said in an email Monday.
According to contest rules: “The winning town will be determined through a combination of total votes, overall support as a result of content [such as photos and testimonials] submitted, and creativity.”
“Chattanooga is in a great position right now,” Ryan Krogh, research editor at Outside magazine, said in a telephone interview on Monday. “Chattanooga won the voting hands down.”
Krogh said the magazine’s editors, some of whom are familiar with Chattanooga, will huddle in coming weeks to consider more subjective factors and name an ultimate winner. He said the contest is not a pure matter of voting because of the relative size of the 10 finalist cities.
“We try to even out the playing field for the smaller towns,” he said.
The winning city will be featured on the cover of the magazine and on a segment on Outside Television.
The three-week online contest featured 10 finalist cities from around the United States nominated by the editors of Outside. Chattanooga and Tucson emerged early in the contest as the leading vote-getters.
This is the first time the magazine has used social media to help choose the winner.
Contact Mark Kennedy at 423-757-6645 or mkennedy@timesfreepress.com
Mark Kennedy is the editor of the Times Free Press opinion pages and writes the Sunday “Life Stories” column. He also writes a Saturday automotive column, “Test Drive,” for the Business section. For 13 years, Kennedy was features editor of the newspaper, and before that he was the newspaper’s first Sunday editor. The Times Free Press Life section won the state press award for Best Community Lifestyles four times during his tenure. Before Chattanooga’s newspapers ...
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More than one-third of online voters chose Chattanooga as the "best town ever" in Outside magazine's contest to determine the ...
It is highly gratifying that Chattanooga won a recent online vote in Outside magazine’s “Best Town Ever” contest.
Chattanooga has won the online voting component of Outside magazine’s “Best Town Ever” contest for 2011.
Chattanooga stands in second place in Outside Magazine’s online contest to find the “Best Town Ever.”
If you belive that all of america is choosing Chattanooga as the best town ever, I have some beach front property in Oklahoma for a good price! There is nothing wrong with being proud of your city but come on? You can run up a vote count easy by voting several times online. Unless you never travel outside Chattanooga (other states), you will not realize how hilarious all this type of stuff is!
Hey kids, breaking news ......chattanooga has just been voted best ever place 4 chiropractors, orthopedic surgeons and psychologists because of injuries created from excessive patting themselves 4 imagined accomplishments . The psychologists say that this tendency to exaggerate is a symptom of an extreme case of collective low self esteem. This being designated a front page story is further evidence.
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