The Best of Pittsburgh edition that you are about to read is, in some ways, the first of its kind. Obviously, this isn’t our first readers’ poll, but there’s something about this issue that’s new. This is the first year that we held a nomination period. Between June 28 and July 19, 2017, 16,933 nominations were made by readers. Then, between July 28 and Aug. 18, 2017, more than 162,000 votes were cast in a ballot drawn from those nominations. We’ve always prided ourselves on making this issue about our readers’ choices, and this year, we had more input from our readers than ever before.