The Tennessean’s Toast of Music City winners for 2012 have been announced, and I’m happy to say that OTF made the top 3 in the Best Blog category, finishing right behind Hear The Raven’s Call (no, not a Baltimore football blog) and the fashionable Style Blueprint.
I think it’s pretty impressive for a blog in Nashville to rank among the top 3 overall due to hockey coverage, so thank you to all who voted. Section303.com made the top 3 for the last two years, so it’s nice to keep Preds talk up there near the top. In related Preds news, Pekka Rinne took the “Best Local Pro Athlete” award, and a Preds game topped the list of “Best Place to Take the Kids”.
Honestly, however, I can’t help but accept this with a grain of salt. The Toast of Music City often looks like a lazy, haphazard effort by a newspaper which considers itself the city’s best in class. For example, the list of nominees was largely a copy & paste job from years past (the Sports Reporter category included Eric Yutzy, who left for Indianapolis in 2010). Patten Fuqua is pointing out other such silliness on Twitter this afternoon.
In addition, during the voting period the Tennessean encourages nominees to put banners on their sites allowing users to click right over to their category and cast a vote. The problem, however, is that users also need to sign into Tennessean.com in order for that vote to count, and once you did that, it kicked you back out to the front page of the ballot, after which you’d have to find your way back to the category in question. Just an ugly, ugly user experience there, it shouldn’t be an issue to redirect people back to where they had intended to vote.
And lastly, even though the finalists are supposed to be invited to a celebration downtown to receive their accolades, we never heard a peep from them. Trust me, the Bride of Forechecker & I were pretty disappointed to hear we had missed out on a chance for a night on the town!
In short, if this event is truly about toasting Nashville’s best & brightest, you’d think the Tennessean would put more effort into it. Instead, it comes off as an annual exercise in motivating the local community to drive web traffic to their site.
OK, enough venting.
I’m honored for OTF to place in the Top 3, and thanks again to those of you who voted. Stay tuned to this channel for news coming soon on a good way in which we can celebrate all of this.
And remember, even though the Toast of Music City is in the books, the Nashville Scene’s Best Of Nashville voting is open through September 12th, and they have both a Best Local Blog and Best Sports Blog category, so I’d appreciate your support there if you’re up for it!