I've made a change.
No, not that kind of change. Especially not after having seen that programme on the TV a few nights back when all the women were men and all the men were women.
I've changed blog 'provider' and have said goodbye to blogger.com and switched to posterous.com instead. It seems a bit more versatile and I can post items directly to it from my phone for instance.
I'm also changing my website too. Expect a slightly different look in the next few days.
OK, the sound quality isn't great but this is the background music playing in Northallerton's top Indian restaurant. Here we are in July and we were hearing 'In the Bleak Midwinter'. Dear oh dear.
As is becoming traditional, I'll start with some of the feedback and comments you've sent me in the last week. Thanks for all of them and please keep them coming.
There appears to be quite a lot of concern about what I will now refer to as 'Log Leak'. Clearly not as scandalous as the Watergate affair, but worrying nonetheless. If you missed last week's log, then you won't know that someone has leaked my ramblings to the Yorkshire Evening Post.
Trudie, who works in regeneration, emailed to ask: Who's the dirty devil who grassed you up?
She was also very kind in saying: I love reading your column. Your style is fab.
The answer is that I don't know who is responsible for 'Log Leak', but am intrigued as to their motivation.
Also, Geoff, who's based in Civic Hall emailed to say: Your weekly updates are without doubt the best thing published anywhere on the council's intranet. Do try not to get fired for them. We would all be terribly sad!
Well, that's very kind Geoff. I'm sure there is lots of other interesting content on the intranet (especially some of the items being sold in the classifieds) and I'll try my best not to get fired – I wouldn't want to make anyone sad!
It's been an interesting few days in communications.
You may remember from my ramblings from last week that I was reflecting on how my team often has to spend a lot of time preparing for things that sometimes never see the light of day. It's the old 'prepare for the worst and hope for the best' scenario.
Well, that was obviously the best approach last week.
Colleagues of ours across the council have spent several months preparing for the news that we had to publish last week. I couldn't say much at the time but it may now be obvious what I was referring to. Last Tuesday was the publication of a serious case review and we were anticipating a lot of media interest. It's fair to say there was significant interest, but we managed to contain the entire story into one 24-hour period.
By making senior people available and supporting them through interviews for radio and television and having pre-prepared statements ready to be issued when asked for them we were able to really control what was going on.
We were open and honest and responded in a timely way.
I must also mention one the council's chief officers who sent a fantastically well written email to her staff the night before the case review was published. It is by far the best bit of communication I have seen since joining the authority last year.
Again, it was open, honest and timely but was also reassuring and positive.
For once we did the right thing – we told the group of staff who were most likely to be affected about the report before it was published. At last, the horse was in front of the cart and most of our colleagues in that specific service area would have known about this first from their manager and not from the front page of the Yorkshire Evening Post.
The challenge, of course, is how we ensure this happens every single time and how we 'throw the net wider' so that we all know about important issues before they are reported to the media. It's something my team and I are determined to influence.
Another thing we'd like to change is how you are 'engaged with.'
Awful phrase I know, but it basically means how involved you are with what's going on here, what's being decided here and where the council is going.
It's also more than just sending you regular messages. I want the council to be much more responsive to your views and your feedback.
Tomorrow I am presenting my ideas for the Leeds City Council People project to my team and I'm hoping it will be the mechanism for putting my 'engagement' aspirations to the test.
As soon as there's further news on that, I'll let you know.
I'm writing this from home this week as I have the day off. I've been left with a list of things to do including the washing up, mowing the lawn, watering the plants and cooking tea; so I'd better stop typing now or nothing will get done.
Until next week, take care.
First this week, I need to say 'hello'. Hello to the many reporters at the Yorkshire Evening Post who I understand have been 'enjoying' this regular feature of mine.
It has been brought to my attention that someone has been doing a 'cut and paste job' and forwarding my ramblings to the newsroom in Wellington Street. I also understand that my comments/thoughts/musings have caused a bit of a kerfuffle. It goes without saying that it's never my intention to cause a kerfuffle. For a good start it's a difficult word to spell.
For the record; the media does frustrate me but that doesn't mean I hate all reporters.
Let's be honest, some journalists are certainly guilty of dodgy reporting, missed out facts and questionable motives but that's par for the course. It comes with the territory. In fact, just 21 months ago, they were me. I was the journalist chastising the life out of Buckinghamshire County and Aylesbury Vale District councils while I was the news editor of the local radio station; using the word 'incinerator' when I knew that the council was trying to promote it as an 'energy from waste plant'. That's why I know where they are coming from.
But now, I'm the poacher turned gamekeeper and I'm uber-defensive of this great organisation that we all work for.
I meet new people all the time in this job (which is the best bit) and as every day goes by I realise that there are thousands of people doing fantastic work for the people of this city and they've got loads of good stories to tell. But does all that hard work ever get reported in full anywhere? Of course not. Not when there's a strip of grass that we forgot to cut.
Yes, the local media needs to hold us to account when we get things wrong and the decisions the council makes need to be scrutinised.
But, ladies and gentlemen of the YEP, I do worry that overall some reporting is unnecessarily negative. The drubbing we get from you is very tiresome. But, it doesn't mean that I wouldn't buy a drink for you if I saw you in the pub.
So then, perhaps there's just a little irony in the following.
I've had an email from the YEP's deputy editor, Nicola Megson, asking if I could promote the paper's new Reader Panel:
Hello Andy and colleagues. I do hope you are well You'll find the details of how to sign up in the pages of the YEP today and on the website, www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk Your help in spreading the message to your own associates, friends, colleagues and contacts would be much appreciated.
I wanted to let you know that the YEP is setting up a Reader Panel.
We
want to find out as much as we can about what people like - and don't
like - about the YEP as a paper and as a website. In the longer term,
as we find out more about people's interests, we hope to communicate
even more efficiently with them regarding specific stories and subjects.
I think you'll agree that any opportunity to increase the dialogue we have with our readers has to be a good thing.
The
key is getting as many people as possible to join - and I'm hoping that
you will sign up and also help push the message to as many people as
possible. The bigger the numbers, the more effective the panel.
Best wishes
Nicola Megson
Deputy Editor
Yorkshire Evening Post
Done. Just to show there are no long-term hard feelings.
Before being 'forced' at the last minute to start with the issue of my leaked log, I was planning to write ... well ... about, umm, planning actually.
I was thinking at the weekend about how part of my team's job is to spend lots of time planning for something with the full intention that you'd rather no-one ever saw the fruits of all of your hard work.
It sounds like a paradox, but it it's not meant to be. Let me explain and give you an example.
There are several people across the council, myself and one of my press officer colleagues who've spent the last few weeks (in fact at least one of them has spent months) preparing and planning for a significant piece of news that had to be released this week. There have been loads of meetings to discuss how this should be handled because of the likely media interest and partner agencies have been co-ordinating and collating their responses. It has been a lot of hard work to get everything ready.
And what outcome am I hoping for after all this work? Easy. I hope it's wasted. I don't want anyone to notice. I'd rather not have to use any of the media statements I've written and re-written numerous times.
Strange I know, but that's what I think. We do lots of preparation in case an issue comes to light in the press and more often than not it never surfaces. I guess that’s one of the more peculiar aspects of the job.
It's a bit like when I was a St John Ambulance volunteer medic. I used to spend hours on end in fields in the rain watching horse or motorbike trials while hoping NOTHING would happen. Mainly because if it did and I had to spring into action it was because someone had been hurt and that's clearly not good.
Finally, a quick warning.
If you see Councillor Richard Brett up a ladder trying to unscrew the main sign from the side of Scott Hall leisure centre, then don't panic.
Cllr Brett has put his weight behind our efforts to sort out the numerous branding and identity issues we have across the council. Although I wasn't there to hear this in person, I understand he's very generously offered to use his own ladder and have a go at the sign himself with his Black and Decker power drill.
This after he saw our photographs showing the worst examples of awful signage on council buildings. Scott Hall leisure centre was the number-one horror, but it seems its days are numbered. Thank goodness.
This is a copy of my weekly blog which I write for work and is published on the council's intranet.
It's worrying that so many people get their news about the council from the Yorkshire Evening Post - especially considering it is so selective about what it prints. Right, before I go any further, let me: 1. Reassure those readers who may be nervous about me making such a claim that I have shared this view quite widely and with my journalist contacts and 2. That I am not at all surprised that the YEP is selective. That's hardly new.
Here's why I'm banging on about it this week. Two reasons.
One is the fact that I'm annoyed that the paper chose to leave out the most relevant bit of a reply we wrote to a letter from Malcolm Naylor of Otley in which he (once again) criticises About Leeds. In his letter he called for About Leeds to be published as a supplement within the YEP. Clearly it was our public duty to investigate whether this idea would hold water and be cost effective. That's why we asked the YEP to quote us for a 16-page supplement. We received an email by return stating that the full rate card cost for four editions would be £553,000. This information was duly used in our reply to Mr Naylor's correspondence in which we were robustly defensive of our paper. You won't be surprised that the YEP cut the bit about the £553,000 even though Mr Naylor's 'supplement suggestion' would have cost £400,000 more than the current bill for producing, printing and distributing About Leeds.
Frankly, that's a ruddy cheek. The paper asks us to respond and then doesn't bother to print the reply in full. How jolly convenient. However, we have sent a copy of the full letter to Mr Naylor so it can see it for himself.
And here's reason two. One of our elected members was getting rather hot under the collar at the end of last week over an issue regarding a failed court case which hindered our ability to deal with a specific problem. This councillor was very keen to express quite a robust view about the court's decision and to make it clear that they were less than happy about the outcome. After a few phone calls, we agreed a line to take and issued a statement which made the councillor's displeasure obvious, but without it being too blunt. Some would say it's not the kind of tone we should take - but I actually think that sometimes we should be a bit more 'bolshie' in our responses to the media. The rest of the statement was rather dull and concerned what legal options were open to us now.
Considering the councillor was very keen to make their point (hence the reason we put it first in the statement) there was a certain amount of irony in the fact the reporter chose to use everything in the statement ... apart from the first sentence and the robust reply! In the past I've been told that people think my press office team and I 'just get in the way' and try to 'obstruct', but clearly that's not the case. Actually, we work hard to make sure that we get a right to reply, but there's not much we can do when a journalist decides to be deliberately selective.
On a more happy note, I was really pleased with the coverage - especially with the broadcast media - that the launch of the Leeds bid to be a host city for the World Cup in 2018 achieved. It was featured on both Look North and ITV Calendar which reach a combined audience of well over 1 million people. Even Sky Sports News turned out.
You can lend your support please, by visiting www.backthebidleeds.com and then clicking through to the main FA website where you can cast your vote for Leeds.
A delegation from the FA will be in the city on Thursday for an inspection visit when they'll be checking out what Leeds has to offer. If you are based in Civic Hall and see lots of big-wigs hanging around outside the new Rose Bowl building at about 1700 then that is why they are there. I've had to write a speech for Councillor Andrew Carter. I've managed to keep it to two sides of A4 and it's suitably gushing about our great city and county.
Finally this week, I received this email from colleagues Jim and Victoria:
I like the tone of the Captain's Log and agreed with what I saw as the thrust that some FOI press queries are about costly fishing trips/lazy journalism rather than the outing of questionable conduct. My plea to whoever is looking at communication is help save us from drowning in a sea of emails. They have become the lazy way to tick the box of having passed on information. I know all about the management of time strategies but am dispirited by the sheer number and often irrelevance of many emails.
Sending or forwarding masses of information is not communication. However, my brain is giving up on being able to handle this challenge, even with help from dedicated business support. Am I the only one? It's not always helped by the numerous exhortations to get staff to fill in the latest survey on xxx... and then the daily reminders on why it's important. Not to mention; In Brief and other worthy newsletters; Questioning the values of these is viewed as heresy.
They used to burn heretics so keep me away from bundles of kindling.
I think this is a very interesting observation and I can't disagree with it.
Let's be honest, the best communication is face-to-face where a manager delivers a message in person to one of his or her team. Unfortunately, there are too many members of staff within Leeds City Council who don't get briefed in person or through a team meeting. That's why there's now an over reliance on emails/written messages. In fact there's an over reliance on email full stop! It annoys and frustrates me that colleagues who sit within feet of me send me an email instead of getting off their backsides and coming over to talk to me. I no longer 'do emails' on a Friday and at last people are noticing. My inbox is a trickle on a Friday compared to a flood the rest of the week.
As a way of trying to move away from loads of written internal communications, my team and I are working on a much more modern way of getting the message across. I'll hopefully have more to share with you on that soon.
Until next week, take care.
