By Larry Felton Johnson

As Editor and Publisher of the Cobb County Courier, I decided to make building our free daily email newsletter a top priority.

There are several reasons for this, some selfish, some based on my understanding of what Cobb County residents need. You can read those reasons below, or just scroll to the bottom to click on the big green button and read today’s newsletter to make your own decision without reading my bloviations.

I’ll begin with my selfish reasons to get them out of the way, since you should know why YOU should subscribe, not why I want you to subscribe.

Why I want you to subscribe

Facebook has deprioritized news to such an extent that traffic to the Cobb County Courier dropped from social media dropped from first place to fourth in our statistics. I’m not really upset with Facebook for that. They have to make their business decisions just like I do. At some point they decided the hassle they were getting from news articles just wasn’t worth it.

As a consequence though, social media traffic is now below Google organic search, referral traffic, and direct visits to our website. Twitter/X /X, in the meantime, has collapsed altogether as a source of traffic.

Most days the total traffic from social media is below 10 percent. Seven years ago, we were running about 70 percent from social media.

That makes my selfish motivation tend toward sources of traffic that aren’t at the mercy of arbitrary algorithm changes at Meta (Facebook and Instagram) or Twitter/X /X (which was never a strong source of traffic to begin with, and now it’s fallen to nothing since that platform is so badly mismanaged).

Why should you want to subscribe?

You probably don’t care about the stuff I wrote above. The Courier’s traffic, after all, is the Courier’s problem, not yours.

So what are the reasons you should subscribe to this free newsletter?

Because not only will you get a list of links to the articles the Cobb County Courier has published in your email every morning, but I have a section called “Quick News Rundown” where I include links to interesting articles about Cobb County from the MDJ, the AJC, East Cobb News, the Brightside, Atlanta Business Chronicle, from the county and various Cobb city websites … any place I can find interesting reporting on what’s going on in Cobb County.

So you’ll get to see a quick survey of what’s happening in the county daily.

If you select the button below, you’ll be taken to a copy of this morning’s newsletter. If you like it, there’s another green button inside the newsletter where you can sign up.

So there’s no risk. It’s free, and there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each newsletter if, for any reason, you no longer want to receive it.