Nearly three decades after starting a community magazine that expanded to a community parade and festival, EAST COBBER publisher Cynthia Rozzo announced this week that she is retiring.
In a publisher’s note in the May/June issue of the EAST COBBER—the 310th—Rozzo said her last day in the post will be June 29, her 60th birthday.
She also said she the EAST COBBER parade and community festival, which has not been held the last two years due to COVID, is not being staged this year as well.
“It was always my intention to provide useful and relevant information that East Cobb residents could not find anywhere else and that focused exclusively on East Cobb,” Rozzo wrote.
“After so many years of meeting readers and business owners, I am reminded every day of how many really nice people there are in this community. East Cobb has so many residents who take the initiative to help out, to share their opinions and/or talents, in order to make East Cobb County a better place to live.”
In a post script, she asked that “if there is anyone out there that wants to carry on the mission of the magazine/and or the annual parade and festival” to contact her.
Rozzo told East Cobb News that she’s working with a potential buyer in the community to continue publication.
“There are a lot of personal reasons,” she said, “but it’s just time.”
She said she wants to be available for her family—her mother and sister live in her native area of Cleveland, Ohio—and she said her husband is interested in eventually moving to Florida.
Rozzo said when she sat down two weeks ago to write the publisher’s note—typically the last task before the magazine goes to press—she said to herself that “I think this may be the time to say something. I didn’t know how to let it go.”
Rozzo started the EAST COBBER in 1993, publishing 11 times a year. The parade started in 1995, staged along Johnson Ferry Road on a Saturday morning in September.
A community festival after the parade had been held at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church.
She has been active in many East Cobb community activities, including the East Cobb Business Association. Most recently, she moderated a Cityhood debate sponsored by the ECBA.
Rozzo also was named the East Cobb Citizen of the Year by the East Cobb Area Council of the Cobb Chamber of Commerce.
Rozzo also ran for the Georgia legislature in 2012, losing in the Republican primary to then-State Rep. Matt Dollar.
After COVID-19, the EAST COBBER began publishing six times a year.
She and her husband, George Haralabidis, who have three children who graduated from Walton High School, will be visiting his native Greece for the next few weeks while she finalizes what she hopes will be a successful transfer of a magazine she built from scratch, and that developed into an influential community enterprise.
In her note, Rozzo thanked readers for “connecting with me and your neighbors. It will take a long time for me to process the rareness of this connection, and the feeling that it’s over. But it’s not over. The changes people create in one another do not go away. You made EAST COBBER with me, and its spirit will live on in whatever comes next for us all.”
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