About What's The Best Report

Last updated April 29, 2026

Why we exist

Search "what's the best ___" for almost any consumer category and you get the same three results: a 17-app listicle ranked by affiliate commission, a vendor-controlled blog dressed up as editorial, and an SEO farm whose ranking moves quarterly with no underlying change in the products. None of these answer the question the reader actually asked. The reader asked for one thing to install on a Tuesday afternoon. The reader got a spreadsheet.

What's The Best Report exists to actually answer the question. For every "what's the best…" topic we cover, an editor with stated credentials picks a single winner, puts that winner in a yellow callout above-fold, and spends the rest of the article defending it — including a section on the things the winner's critics get right. If we can't pick one, we don't publish the article. "It depends" is the failure mode this publication exists to avoid.

How we got here

The publication was founded on August 18, 2025, by Theodora Brennan-Voss, a Northwestern Medill journalist with eleven years of consumer-tech editorial experience at Tom's Guide, Engadget, and The Verge. Her motivating frustration is the one stated above: she watched the consumer-tech category split, with hardware getting a serious testing infrastructure (Wirecutter for kitchen, RTINGS for displays, AVForums for projectors) while software, services, sleep tech, and the rest of the consumer-app universe were left to listicle blogs whose rankings shuffled with the commission rate.

Within four weeks of launch, Theodora recruited the four editors who own the publication's category beats: Bjorn Ostergaard (wearables, smart home, ex-Garmin firmware), Ravi Mehta (productivity, AI tools, ex-Asana engineering), Yolanda Achebe-Forster (sleep, wellness, formerly senior writer at Sleep Foundation), and Camille Boudreaux-Hill (nutrition tracking, formerly senior writer at Healthline). Each one of them came in with a specific category-level credential gap they were brought in to fill, and each one of them has gating authority over verdicts that touch their beat.

The team

• Theodora Brennan-Voss, BA, MS — Editor-in-Chief.
• Ravi Mehta, MS — Senior Tech Editor (Productivity + AI).
• Bjorn Ostergaard, BS — Wearables & Smart Home Lead.
• Yolanda Achebe-Forster, MA, CSSC — Sleep & Wellness Editor.
• Camille Boudreaux-Hill, MPH — Health & Nutrition Tracking Editor.

Every byline is a real person with verifiable credentials. We do not publish anonymous content. We do not buy bylined content from contractor pools. Author profiles, credentials, and conflict-of-interest statements are at /authors/.

What we do

• For every question, pick one winner and defend it in plain prose.
• Publish a yellow "THE ANSWER:" callout above-fold so the reader gets the verdict in the first second on the page.
• Defend the verdict in long form, with a section on honest cons and a list of credible runners-up we considered and rejected.
• Sign every article with a named editor's credentials.
• Maintain a public update log so the cadence of our work is auditable.

What we do not do

We accept no affiliate compensation. We do not maintain affiliate tracking links to any product named on this site. We do not accept payment from product makers. We do not let vendors review or comment on a draft before publication. We do not gate methodology behind a paywall. We do not publish a "best 17 ___" listicle ever, full stop — the editorial format we built this publication to replace.

Editorial philosophy

We take a category-by-category view. Each editor owns the categories where their credentials are strongest. Theodora signs off on every cross-category verdict and on the harder-to-pick categories — finance, AI tools — where the runner-up is genuinely close to the winner. Camille is the gating reviewer on any nutrition claim regardless of which editor wrote the article. Yolanda is the gating reviewer on any sleep claim. Bjorn is the gating reviewer on any sensor or radio claim.

We publish honest cons on every winner. If a reader finishes one of our articles unable to articulate the strongest argument against the winner we picked, we have failed. The strongest argument against the winner is always in the article.

Contact

Editorial inquiries: editor@whatsthebest.report. Corrections: correction@whatsthebest.report. See our full contact page.