Rapid City Journal Readers' Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

Rapid City Journal runs two branded ballots, and the URL decides which one

rapidcityjournal.com/exclusive/readerschoice/ballot-2025/. That's a mouthful, and it's also the entire distinguishing fact of this program. Rapid City Journal doesn't run one single "best of" effort. It runs at least two: this one, called Readers' Choice, and a separate contest called Best of the Black Hills, at a different address entirely, rapidcityjournal.com/contests/.

A business handed a bare "vote for us on Rapid City Journal" message has no way to tell which of the two it's actually being asked to join. The category list, the coverage area, and the URL itself all differ between them.

No vote cap, no fixed close date, and no results timeline show up alongside those facts. What the URL does confirm is a year, 2025, worth double-checking against whatever cycle is actually live before treating this page's link as current.

How this program differs from the Journal's other contest, Best of the Black Hills

Coverage is the clearest split between the two. Readers' Choice states Rapid City as its area. Best of the Black Hills, the Journal's other branded effort, explicitly reaches into Sturgis, Spearfish, Deadwood, Custer, and Hot Springs as part of a wider tourism region. A Rapid City business fits cleanly into either description; a Sturgis or Deadwood business fits only the second one.

Why one paper runs what look like two separate ballots

Nothing in the confirmed program details explains the Journal's reasoning, and this page won't guess at motives it can't verify. What's checkable is the outcome: two URLs, two stated coverage areas, two category counts, roughly 80 here against an unstated but broader multi-category list on the other, and no cross-reference between them found in either program's public record.

For the wider-region version, see the Best of the Black Hills guide directly. A business unsure which one its invitation actually points to should open the link itself and check the address bar, not assume from the name alone.

What an online ballot with 80 categories actually asks of a business

Eighty categories is a real number to search through, not a quick scroll. Rapid City Journal Readers' Choice runs as a straightforward online ballot on the paper's own site, rather than routing through a third-party voting platform, so the vote itself happens on rapidcityjournal.com and nowhere else.

What isn't confirmed is whether this runs as a single voting round or a nomination-then-finalist structure the way some newspaper contests do. Absent that detail, the safer assumption is a single round: find the category, cast the vote, and don't wait for a second phase that may not exist.

A dated URL pattern like ballot-2025 also suggests the Journal rebuilds this page for each cycle rather than reusing one permanent address year after year. Worth flagging to anyone running a repeat campaign: the link that worked last year isn't guaranteed to work this one.

Rapid City itself, not the wider region, is who this ballot actually serves

Box Elder, Piedmont, Black Hawk, Summerset, and the Rapid Valley corridor sit close enough to Rapid City that a business in any of them could plausibly consider itself part of this program's stated coverage, even though the confirmed detail names Rapid City specifically rather than the metro area as a whole.

That's a narrower frame than the Journal's other contest casts, and it matters for anyone deciding where to spend limited campaign effort. A business well outside Rapid City proper, in Sturgis or Deadwood, say, is better served checking whether Best of the Black Hills fits instead of assuming this ballot covers it too.

Running a clean campaign on a ballot the Journal could reissue next year

A vote-promotion service can help a Rapid City business turn its actual customers into people who open the correct, current-year link and vote in the right category. It can't confirm which of the Journal's two contests a given invitation was meant for, and it can't guarantee the ballot address stays the same past this cycle. Those are things only rapidcityjournal.com itself can settle.

Real supporters, sent to a link double-checked against the live site, are the only dependable path here. For general campaign mechanics, how online contest votes work and the award vote campaign guide cover ground that applies whether a business ends up on this ballot or the wider-region one, and business-of-the-year vote campaigns fits a readers-choice format like this directly. Read is buying votes legal before committing budget to either Rapid City Journal contest.