Welcome to the Best of the Bay!
People are always asking us, figuring that anyone who works at a newspaper should know where to find the best crabcake, who’s the Bay’s best band, what’s the best festival on the Bay and all sorts of other secrets. To find out, we needed to turn to you, our loyal readers.
As you’ll remember, back in February and March we ran the first annual Best of the Bay readers’ survey. With 85 questions, this was no light undertaking, for it required a fair amount of thought to fill out all the questions. Few ballots came back with all the blanks filled; fewer still came back with less than the three-quarters of questions that we asked of you to prevent ballot stuffing.
All in all, more than 1,000 ballots came back to us, and the opinions were all over the board. You may notice a few categories missing from the original ballot. In these cases, less than 10 percent of respondents filled in the blank, which we felt too little to warrant a “Best of” award. By no means a scientific poll, the “Best of the Bay” does offer some insights into life in
Chesapeake Country
Best of the Bay comes to you as a result of much hard work. All of us at Bay Weekly have lost sleep counting the votes, contacting the winners and writing about what you told us was best. Special thanks to contributors Mark Burns, Bill Burton, Jennifer Dawicki, Chris Dollar, Lisa Edler, Carol Glover, Christopher Heagy, Betsy Kehne, Georgia Knoll, John Alexander Knoll, Nathaniel Martin Knoll, Bill Lambrecht, Amanda Lofton, Sandra Martin and Rachel Presa.
Special thanks to Fresh Fields Whole Foods Market for donating the $100 shopping certificate for our drawing of ballots. And congratulations to Christy Miller of Waldorf, the winner of the Fresh Fields shopping certificate.
Hard work aside, what fun it’s been learning the final results, chosen by Bay Weekly’s readers. There were some shoo-ins, but also more than a few surprises.
We welcome your feedback, and we also ask for any suggestions for additions to next year’s Best of the Bay questionnaire, scheduled to begin running the first issue in February 2002.
