Opinion: Next week, the wait will be over

Published 1:30 am Thursday, March 24, 2016

Things are really starting to get busy around here.

For some reason, we at the Valley Record have a lot of special projects coming due each spring — a Chamber of Commerce directory coming out next month, a Visitor’s Guide the following month, and so on.

I doubt there is any one of these special projects more anticipated than our Best of the Valley reader survey results, coming next week.

I’ll admit, when I first came to the Record five years ago, I didn’t quite get it. I understood that it was a reader survey — and that the transition to all online voting was a slow and difficult one, which people still opposed. And I caught a little of the excitement surrounding the “Best of” results announcements, but that’s where it ended, then.

Nothing in my past experience prepared me for how serious these awards seemed to be. Longtime winners built advertising campaigns around this reader recognition, and I got more “vote for us” e-mail blasts than I can remember. I have never heard the phone in this office ring so much, not even two years ago when a gas explosion leveled several buildings in North Bend two years ago.

A year later, though, I was up to speed, or so I thought. The phone still rang, the e-mail blasts increased, and it turned out that, no matter what we improved on from last year, there are always going to be one or two hiccups in the system to work out.

Speaking of which, we do appreciate the feedback from callers and writers who let us know about these hiccups — we can’t fix something if we don’t know about it. Sometimes we can’t fix it even when we do know about it, but we do take your feedback to heart and we try to improve things.

Voting ended in this year’s Best of the Valley reader survey last Wednesday.

Once again, it seemed like the voting had barely begun before it was over, but more than 11,000 votes were entered in the four-week window.

I hope you all got a chance to vote, and I hope you all are looking forward to next week’s paper, when the wait for the results will be over, as much as I am.