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 but do not necessarily reflect those of the authority itself.

First this week, I want to put to bed two of the issues that have been ‘on the boil’ for the last two weeks in my log.

Firstly, I’ve had more emails from you regarding my comments about being ‘disappointed in you’ with regard to the Independent’s job losses story.

For the record, I value you all as colleagues and those comments were made to spark a debate, not to be negative about you as individuals.

I still remain much more disappointed with how the Independent and a number of local media outlets (the BBC included) simply waggled a finger in the air and came up with their own job ‘losses’ figures after either using some very dubious maths or a calculator which was missing a few buttons.

Anyway, let’s draw a line under that one now.

The other issue is the council radio station and it seems many of you are in favour and think it is a good idea.  I’ve had several more messages with suggestions about programmes and presenters.

Perhaps the best email was from Au … oh, hold on, he wanted to remain anonymous … from … Mr X in customer services who suggested:

“Exclusion Songs with [someone from Education Leeds].  They could read out letters from the parents of excluded children and dedicate songs to their misguided [offspring].”

“The Saturday Morning Streetscene Show.  The operations managers can review their rotas and forecast which bins will be missed in the city in the following week.”

Ooh, Mr X  - that’s harsh and unbefitting.  No wonder you didn’t want your name printed!

Thanks to all of you who’ve emailed me: the two subjects above seem to have been the ones that have got you most fired up this year so far.

Right, social media and in particular Twitter is back on the horizon again.

“To tweet or not to tweet (in the council chamber), that is the question.”

OK, so I was never good at understanding the finer points of Shakespeare, but it seemed an easy cliché.  That’s because I’ve been working on a report over the last few days about the issue of the use of electronic equipment in the council chamber and whether it should be allowed.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle at the last full council meeting when it seems some members ignored the Lord Mayor’s instructions to have their phones switched off during the meeting.

Instead, they were using them to go onto the social networking site, Twitter.

Whether that’s right, wrong, appropriate or not is one issue, but what is far more interesting for me is the understanding of what Twitter is all about among, how can I put this politely … umm, the age group that most councillors fall into.

This may sound obvious, but there are some fairly defined generational groups who don’t have a clue about Twitter.

My sister-in-law, who’s 21, knows about it but ‘only uses Facebook’.  Meanwhile, my uncle, who’s 45 and considers himself to be a techno/web whizz, also knows about Twitter but ‘doesn’t get why people would want to send short messages about what they are doing’.

He’s missing the point entirely of course (says the man who tweets about all sort of nonsense, including observations about my fellow passengers on the 6.25 train to Leeds).

I know that a number of senior officers and councillors needed an explanation about what Twitter is and what it does even before the question of whether it should be ‘used’ in the council chamber could be tackled.

There are some predictions that the general election on May 6 will be ‘fought and won’ using social media.  Given what I’ve mentioned above, I’m not too sure about this.  Your views are welcome to the usual address please.

My team and I are now discussing whether we should ‘tweet’ the local election results (Twitter wouldn’t be the only way of getting the results out though).  I don’t want to be tweeting just for the sake of it or because it’s the latest social media ‘fad’ to do so.  Instead, I want to be convinced there’s an audience out there who want to receive the information that way.

Finally, we reached a bit of a milestone in our team this last week.

The virtual newsroom is now a year old and we’ve added our first ever non-bona fide newsgatherer to the automatic email alerts system.  We decided to do that given the fact the vast majority of people who are now using the virtual newsroom or are receiving our news via it are not actually journalists.

Much to the disgust of some local media organisations, we’re now having a direct conversation with increasingly large numbers of our residents who aren’t getting information second hand or messages that have been tainted by nasty reporters!

One day, perhaps we won’t need the local media.  Bring it on we say!