River Edges is due for a name change for three reasons:
- It’s time to register River Edges as a Limited Liability Corporation and apply for a business license, since revenue, however meager, is beginning to trickle in. Once we start generating revenue, we’re required to get a business license and pay taxes, and organizing as an LLC is the most sensible thing to do. There is another LLC in Georgia with a name similar to River Edges. While the name of the other LLC is different enough we’d probably survive a cease-and-desist order, running the risk just to hang onto the name River Edges doesn’t make sense.
- River Edges no longer reflects the geographical area we’re covering. When River Edges began, the target area was both sides of the Chattahoochee River between Smyrna and Six Flags, and the corresponding neighborhoods across the river in the City of Atlanta. We’ve never achieved traction on the east side of the river, and our coverage has expanded northward and westward into Cobb County with the addition of freelancers in Smyrna, Powder Springs, Acworth, Kennesaw, and Marietta. We’ve become a solidly Cobb County news source, and our name should recognize that.
- As the editor, it is my opinion that we need a name that indicates what we are: a news site. River Edges could be the name of a personal blog, a magazine about fishing, a poetry journal, or a trade publication for hydrologists. We’re a news site. Most of our articles are written in the traditional “inverted pyramid” of newspaper reporting, and those that aren’t, tend to be in one of the standard formats of feature writing.
I’m inclined to choose something generically newspaperish. The Cobb County Sentinel, the Cobb County Dispatch, the Cobb County Observer, and the Cobb County Courier are all names I’ve considered. There are several names I thought about that I demoted for different reasons. Cobb County News is in use by the AJC to describe their local section for the county. Cobb County Times was a historic paper absorbed by the Marietta Daily Journal, and they may still have the rights to the name. Cobb County Tribune is probably legally defensible, but the name Tribune is so closely associated with the newspaper chain whose flagship was the Chicago Tribune that I’d like to stay away from it. And the Cobb County Post was eliminated because another metro news site, the Brookhaven Post, is using “Post” in the title.
So what do you think, readers? The best place to give input is the Facebook page for River Edges at https://www.facebook.com/riveredges/
