PORT ANGELES — Port Angeles’ enthusiastic run in Outside magazine’s “Best Town Ever” 2015 contest has earned the city a prime feature article in the national magazine’s September edition.
Port Angeles came in second after a head-to-head battle with Chattanooga, Tenn., a town eight times its size.
The post-contest review isn’t yet complete at Outside magazine’s editorial headquarters in Santa Fe, N.M., but Port Angeles’ winning energy, which brought it the title of West Coast Division champ, surprised and impressed the magazine’s staff, said Jonah Ogles, an associate editor, in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Fueled by social media campaigns by the Revitalize Port Angeles Facebook group, Port Angeles, pop. 19,000, garnered 62,130 votes, or 47.95 percent of the online ballots cast by the public in the final round of the contest against the Southern Division winner, Chattanooga — pop. 170,000 and a former national winner of the contest — which won 67,432 votes, or 52.05 percent.
1.7 million votes
The six rounds of the contest resulted in 1.7 million votes on the magazine’s website, Ogles said.
“It’s much higher [than in past years]. It was a substantial increase in the number of comments, in page views and unique visitors,” he said.
Ogles said that while Chattanooga will get the September cover and main story — which it may have to share with an unrelated story — Port Angeles will also get a write-up with photographs as the runner-up.
Other communities in the contest will get smaller mentions in the magazine’s fifth annual “Best Town Ever” write-up, he said.
Ogles said writers and photographers will visit Chattanooga to visit local restaurants and outdoor offerings.
No visits by writers are planned to Port Angeles, but a photographer may come to town.
Art editors will make a decision whether to use existing Port Angeles photographs or send a photographer in late June or early July.
The print edition of Outside has 680,000 print subscribers, plus newsstand sales, and an estimated print readership of 2 million individuals per month.
There are an estimated 2.8 million online readers, with some overlap between print and online readers, Ogles said.
The “Best Town Ever” contest for 2015 began in January with the selection of 60 towns by editors.
Port Angeles was a last-minute wildcard addition based on Instagram votes along with three other cities in the tournament modeled on the NCAA’s “March Madness” contest.
“A lot of us familiar with the Pacific Northwest had heard of Port Angeles, but we didn’t know what it had to offer,” Ogles said.
Must-visit location
Port Angeles partisans posted photos of the Port Angeles area and Olympic National Park on Outside’s website as part of soliciting votes during the tournament, and there was conversation in the magazine’s office that it looked like a must-visit location.
“It was a town we overlooked,” he said.
Ogles said he hopes to visit Port Angeles while on a trip to Seattle later this year.
Outside’s “Best Town Ever” contests began in 2011 with a 10-city runoff in a Facebook contest, which was won by Chattanooga, Ogles said.
The contest continued through 2013 in that format. The 64-town bracket was established in 2014, he said.
Ogles said the top 16 winners from each year — including all 10 competitors from the Facebook contests — are ineligible to compete again for three years.
Port Angeles and Chattanooga will not be eligible for selection again until 2019, he said.
There are no plans to bar Chattanooga because it’s a two-time winner.
Was the contest a mismatch between a small town and a city? Ogles didn’t think so.
“Small to mid-size cities towns usually have a good history of punching above their weight,” he said.
Large cities, such as New York City, generally fall out in the early rounds, he noted, while medium-sized cities and smaller towns tend to last to the finals.
Ogles didn’t know if Port Angeles was the smallest finalist ever in the contest but said dramatic endings like this year’s are common — with see-sawing of the leaders, multiple lead changes in the same day and animated online discussions.
However, in the Port Angeles-Chattanooga contest, the supporters in each town “got a little snippy,” he said.
An 8,000 vote overnight surge in votes for Port Angeles concerned many who were following the contest.
No cheating, hacking
The computer manager for Outside examined the votes received, but did not find any evidence of cheating or hacking, Ogles said.
However, he said there was concern that Port Angeles might enlist the aid of Seattle or another large venue to add thousands of votes in the final hours, causing concern for Chattanooga voters.
“To put everyone at ease, we put Captcha on this to make sure it was real people making real votes,” he said.
Captcha is a system that requires voters to read a slightly distorted set of numbers or letters, and enter those numbers.
Voting “bots” — a computer program that repeatedly votes as programmed — cannot read the distorted content.
Ogles said the votes were limited by individual device IP addresses, rather than those of routers.
To eliminate multiple votes, the voting software remembered device IP addresses, unique identification numbers used to identify those using the internet.
Another concern from those who watched the contest was whether or not their votes counted, since the voting button does not disappear after a vote is made.
“I never had so many people worried their vote hadn’t counted,” Ogles said.
Voting button
One of the things that will be examined for next year will be possible changes to the voting button, he said, which appeared unchanged after a vote was made and unclear whether it had worked, or if another vote was possible.
“It’s a function of our voting software,” he said.
A Chattanooga startup company, RootsRated, an outdoor-experience-based media platform, funneled readers to Outside’s voting page through its own micro-Web site where it partnered with the contest sponsor, Toad&Co., which sells clothing.
Asked if it was unfair for Toad&Co. to sponsor both the contest itself and the push by RootsRated for votes for Chattanooga, Ogles ducked the question.
“We picked the towns and slotted them into brackets,” he said.
From there, it was up to the voters who took part in the contest, he said.
“We were happy to get an advertising sponsor,” he added.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arice@peninsuladailynews.com.
