Comment: How real should Leeds message be?

SEARCH for Leeds in your favourite search engine and the city council’s website is likely to feature pretty highly. In the ones I tried it was only beaten by the University and Leeds United and was certainly ahead of the Leedsliveitloveit and visitleeds sites.

So it’s a fair bet that potential investors in the city and wider region might find themselves at the authority’s online front door. When they do, should they only find an unremittingly positive message about Leeds?

The question was brought into focus yesterday when the top stories on the ‘local news’ section of the recently revamped site were a court case involving the conviction of a prison nurse, the tragic story of a father murdering his wife and children before taking his own life and another court case centering on a road death.

At one point the top story was about a man who had abused dead British soldiers on Facebook. The man at the centre of this particular unflattering story wasn’t even from Leeds.

In fairness to the City Council, the local news section – an unedited feed from BBC News – is only one part of the homepage which carries plenty of more positive news about the city. And maybe it should be congratulated for embracing the sometimes gritty reality of city life. It certainly helps make the site more lively than the typical council offering.

But when you might get just one chance to present an impression of the city to a chief executive looking to invest in the UK, the headline “Rapist sex prison nurse jailed” might not be the one you would go for.

For the curious keen to learn about Leeds, there is a diverse media and blogging community presenting the many different faces of the city, good and bad. Council officials worried about adopting a Pravda-esque approach can rest assured there is plenty of balance out there.

Leading councillors and top officials are relentlessly positive about Leeds. Maybe the authority’s website should be too.

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