The story below is running on the holdthefrontpage.co.uk website.

As far as I can tell the mayor of Donny appears to have some particular issues with his authority's newsletter, but he's also stating the bleeding obvious!  Of course a council's civic newspaper is bordering on propaganda.

You could hardly expect an organisation to slag itself off in its own publication.

OK, if I was in charge, there's no way that I would have used the 'Doncaster News' to criticise the media about it's 'hostile and ill-informed' coverage of the issues faced by the council's children's services team (because clearly there were plenty of issues ...)

Each year in Leeds there's a debate led by the opposition about why our paper should be scrapped - but it's always down to cost, not content.

We've just done a survey which establishes that the vast majority of our readers say they prefer to get their news about the council via the paper and less than two per cent want to be talked to by a councillor.

I rest my case.

Council newsletter scrapping saves £67,000

This is a copy of my weekly blog which I write for work and is published on the council's intranet.  The views I express in this log are my own, professional, views as the Head of Communications for Leeds City Council but do not necessarily reflect those of the authority itself.

This week – in a kind of academic style – I want to put forward the suggestion that as communicators we should be a bit more like the … police.

No, I don't mean driving round in fast cars with blue lights flashing (actually that sounds like a great idea for getting to work on time – Ed) but using better intelligence.

OK, if you've ever watched Ashes to Ashes, Chief Inspector Gene Hunt is clearly not the copper who's going to consult a fresh intelligence report before 'firing up the Quattro' and heading out to have a 'chat' with one of his informers. But, modern policing is very different.

Crack houses are raided on the basis of intelligence, community support officers are out there patrolling to gather intelligence and policing decisions are based on … yep, you've guessed it: intelligence.

Could you imagine a police force which raids a house on the off-chance that something dodgy is being grown in the conservatory? It's not going to happen.

I admit that some police intelligence is clearly not right and on occasion there are tragic results (think the Stockwell shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes).

So, I suggest then that it's fair to say that intelligence is really important and being able to make a decision based on facts and information is vital. Hence the assertion that we – as communicators – need to be a bit more like the police.

We should base our decisions about campaigns, messages and channels on evidence. We should be able to prove there's a need and a benefit to something we want to do.

And is that happening in the council right now … well in most cases probably not.

Unfortunately, some campaigns are slapped together a bit willy-nilly. There are no checks to assess the message, the channel or the method, and then there's no follow up to assess and evaluate whether something worked.

There is good news though – because that approach is changing.

For example, in the latest edition of About Leeds we've included a questionnaire to find out what our readers think of the paper. The first results are in and we already know that the vast majority of readers – from a 16 to a 99 year-old – say they prefer to get their news about the council from the About Leeds publication. Only a quarter report that they would prefer to get their local news via the local media.

The whole point of this exercise is to inform the debate about the future of About Leeds. Before we had done this study we would have based decisions on instinct. Now we're basing it all on intelligence and insight into the reader, or the customer if you prefer.

It also means we can more robustly defend the paper in future, because we actually know that people value it as a tool for them being informed about the work we're doing.

The same applies to the media coverage we generate. We can now do a much more detailed analysis of each story and bit of coverage so we can see what works best and whether we need to divert extra resources to tackle negative reporting.

So, that might mean that insight, intelligence, research and information is actually more important than the communicator's ability to craft an interesting message or write a decent press release.

Finally, talking of press releases – we've had some successes to shout about this week.

There was lots of great coverage and interest for the parade of The Rifles Regiment when they were given the freedom of the city at the weekend. And there was equal interest in the civic reception being laid on for the Australian cricket team when they arrive here later today.

I suspect you also won't have missed the coverage for the ASBO girl from Wetherby who secured us lots of coverage but mainly because she's a 14-year-old who's downing 12 cans of lager a day. The story even made some of the national Sunday titles.

In the – extended - podcast this week I look at plans to set up a team of journalists who would just cover public-sector stories, like council, NHS and police authority meetings. The idea has been put forward by the Press Association, but is the likely £100 million price tag – which would be paid from the public purse – likely to be good value for money.

We'll hear from the editor of the Guardian and I discuss the idea with Clel Thom, former news editor and now media law expert and trainer.

You can listen to or download the podcast here: http://podcasts.andycarter.eu

I've been sent this story by a former colleague at the BBC.  It is running on the PA wires this evening.

I'm not in a position to comment on the claims made by this man's partner - but I can appreciate how it could be difficult to spin a story when you personally don't believe in it.

A Ministry of Defence press officer from York suffered post-traumatic stress disorder after feeling he was forced to be "frugal with the
truth" about the safety of troops in Iraq, his partner has claimed. 

John Salisbury-Baker, 62, whose job also involved dealing with the families of dead soldiers, began suffering stress about two years ago and is suing the MoD for disability discrimination. 

His partner Christine Brooke, 65, said she believed Mr Salisbury-Baker felt responsible for the deaths of the soldiers because of his role in speaking out about the safety of military equipment in Iraq. 

Mr Salisbury-Baker began working for the MoD in 1996 as an information officer and became defence press officer at the Imphal Barracks in York about four years later. 

His job involved telling the media that Army vehicles, such as Snatch Land Rovers, were adequately equipped to withstand roadside bombs and supporting the families of soldiers who had been killed. 

In 2007, he was diagnosed with stress-related angina after suffering anxiety, discomfort in his chest and sleepless nights, and was off work sick for 12 months. 

He returned to work briefly but was subsequently told he had post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Ms Brooke said: "He felt quite shaky one day, he started to shake and couldn't stop. He went to see the doctor and he diagnosed him with suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which he said had gone on for a long time. 

"It goes back to the fact he felt torn because he had a moral dilemma based on the fact he knew a little bit more about the situation than the people he was dealing with - those whose sons had died. He was trying to support them but feeling in his heart of hearts that if things had been done differently he wouldn't have been there."

No, this isn't a blog post about football - it's actually to do with getting what you want when you go to a meeting of senior managers.
 
A colleague and I have been to present to the weekly gathering of the council's corporate leadership team (the biggest cheeses) to talk to them about where we are and where we want to go with the issue of branding and identity.
 
We've got some serious issues and they need sorting out if we're to properly make the link between the many fantastic services we provide and the public's perception of the council.
 
There's also an additional challenge.
 
Next May Leeds is playing host to the Local Government communications conference and as many as 300 of the UK's top communications professionals in the city for three days.
 
I want them to see us getting it right.
 
The good news is the big cheeses endorsed everything we want to do and have asked us to present to senior councillors to get their support.
 
If CLT was the first division, then the politicians are the 'premier league'.

Please don't read this if you are of a nervous disposition.

It has been brought to my attention that the C word has been used openly in posh Northallerton.

One of the charity shops in the High Street has a frankly brazen sign in the window advising shoppers they can buy their CHRISTMAS cards in store right now.

H-e-l-l-o! It's AUGUST for goodness sake.

What next? Easter Eggs being promoted in November? God forbid.

I've had to write a 'biography' which will be used on my 'profile page' for the council's intranet.  My effort is below.

All comments are welcome; good or bad.

Andy is the 'new kid on the block' only having been at the council since January 2008 when he joined the authority as its press and media relations manager.

He's a former journalist who acknowledges the fact he is a 'poacher turned gamekeeper' as lots of his ex colleagues like to remind him.

Andy's 16 year career in broadcasting has seen him working for organisations like Sky News and the BBC and reporting from various corners of the world including Bosnia, Kosovo and from a speedboat taking part in a race around the Isle of Wight!

Andy is a fully qualified bus driver and sometimes spends his weekends driving groups of passengers on mystery tours around Yorkshire. They are mainly a mystery because more often than not he's clueless as to where he's going.

I'm about to make a huge change to the way I travel to and from work and it has massive consequences for one particular train company.

For the last 19 months I've been liftsharing the first 44 miles of my journey from home to Garforth and from there switching to train for the final 10 minute trip into the city centre.  In a military style operation, I've co-ordinated shifts with my sharer so the whole process can be repeated in the afternoon for the ride home.

That has been the case for an average four days a week, with some trips entirely by train from home to office because of my lift not being available.

But - from Tuesday the liftshare will no longer be an option, because the person who owns the car I shared has jacked in their job in Bradford and is going back to university on Teesside to study to be a teacher.

That means the train will be taking the entire strain.  And I'm worried about that because I don't think Transpennie Express can deliver. 

As I'll now be handing over the best part of £3500 each year for the 'right' to commute from home to Leeds every day, I will be closely monitoring how the firm and its trains perform.  There's also one thing that's confusing me.  Having (as I now have had to ... believe me it wasn't for pleasure) studied the timetable, I'm left clueless as to why some trains cover the distance between Northallerton and Leeds in 55 minutes while others take one hour and six minutes.  The stopping pattern is the same; but on some journeys there's an inexplicable wait of up to 15 minutes at York.

Is this a loo break for the crew?  Or is this gap designed to allow them enough time to nip to Costa for an expresso?

This matter is annoying me already.  As much as York is beautiful, I don't want to have to waste as much as 30 minutes a day staring out of the window at the city's station while waiting for the train to get on with the rest of the journey.

I'm not particularly patient with trains nor some of the people who travel on them; so this could be hell for me.  I'd better load up my iPod with relaxing whale music.  I reckon I'm going to need it.

One of my colleagues told me the other day that she thought Twitter was about to die. 'Have you heard of Audio Boo?' she asked. 'It's the new Twitter!' she declared.

Yep, Audio Boo is great and it's catching on. I regularly listen to podcasts from the American technology journalist Leo Laporte and during his recent visit to China he was booing (that's what it's called when you post a recording) every day with updates on his travels. It was really interesting.

The sound quality is great and the user interface is fantastic it seems.

But, there's a problem. In order to Boo, you need an iPhone. Fine if you can afford one; but for me a non-starter because I can't justify getting another new handset just so I can send recordings in from out 'in the field'.

Bugger. However, my dish lip didn't last for long.

I've found an alternative. One download of some recording software onto my Nokia E71 later and hey presto! I'm sorted.

I'm calling them Andy Boos and you can expect quite a few of them in future now that I've mastered the technology and I have mustered up the confidence to stand in public while waffling into my phone. I've started with a few on this site; scroll down to listen to my first attempts.

Boo Boo for now.