By Larry Felton Johnson

Here are the top ten stories published by the Cobb County Courier from Saturday July 6 to Friday July 12.

1. Scattered storms & high heat index bring possible hazardous weather for north and central Georgia July 7 There are always at least two weather-related stories in our top ten list. During extreme weather that number can increase to four or five.
2. Superintendent pulls plug on Cobb’s $50 million event center The proposed event center for the Cobb County School District was controversial, so it’s no surprise this story by Rebecca Gaunt which we ran July 9 did well on our list. Looking over today’s stats shows it’s still picking up views.
3. Residents receive fraudulent texts claiming to be from Cobb elections department — This article run on July 7 was what I call a boilerplate article since most of the information in the article was directly from the county’s news release. Still, it was a weird story. In most cases where someone goes to the trouble of fraudulently presenting themself as someone else, there’s a monetary motive. In this case all the offender did was send a link to an absentee ballot information website that was widely and openly available.
   
   Why bother to hide your identity, much less pretend to be Cobb Elections in that case? It seems like all risk for no reward.
4. Health inspection scores for Cobb County restaurants and other food services from June 28 to July 4 This routine article, run last week on July 8, always does well in traffic. I’m not 100 percent sure why, but I guess it makes sense, since no one likes to think the restaurants they eat at fail to meet health standards.
5. Heat advisory noon-8 PM for Georgia Saturday: Heat index could hit 109° This was the first of several articles about the heat wave that hit us last week. It ran on July 6.
6. ‘Divisive concepts’ law at work: LGBTQ books pulled from Cobb schools, Shakespeare flagged for review This article by Rebecca Gaunt about the recent wave of book removals in the Cobb County School District’s libraries also drew substantial traffic.
7. Cobb County Courier Dog of the Day: “I’m Charlie, and I’m straining at the leash to go home with you!” Our Dog of the Day and Cat of the Day articles generally do well, particularly on social media where they get shared a lot. But for some reason this doggy, Charlie, really struck a not with readers.
8. Update on the spills into Lake Allatoona: We got a copy of the finished report on the out-of-range test readings at the Northwest Water Reclamation Facility, exchanged emails with the county, talked to an engineer at the EPD, interviewed a Kennesaw State University environmental scientist via email, and put together this explanation of what caused four reports of spills of disinfected wastewater into Lake Allatoona. The article did pretty well in terms of interest from readers.
9. Heat index of over 105 expected in central Georgia Monday; scattered storms across entire region Another weather alert got the number 9 slot in terms of traffic.
10. Medical event suspected in fatal crash on Powder Springs Road Number 10 in the ranking of reader interest was a tragic story; a crash on Powder Spring Road that resulted in one death and one serious injury.