Brace yourselves, Puebloans. This is going to sting a little bit.

USA Today posted a lengthy article on its website this week under the headline: “These are the worst cities to live in, state by state.” And yeah, the article named Pueblo as Colorado’s “worst” city.

It would be easy to dismiss this as just more substance-free click bait, of which the internet already has plenty. USA Today runs a lot of “best of” and “worst of” lists, probably because people like to read them.

And that’s why we chose not to ignore this article, which was actually written by 24/7 Wall Street, an independent organization that provides financial news and commentary to the newspaper.

The problem is that people will read the article — and some will take it seriously. It’s bad when people who live here see something like that and feel worse about themselves or their living situations. And it’s particularly bad when people who’ve never been here see such a negative article and form opinions about Pueblo without any firsthand experience of their own.

As Puebloans, we could all come up with lists of other Colorado towns that we view as worse places to live than our city. After all, if we thought those places were better, we’d probably move there.

It’s sometimes instructive to find out more about the methodology used to prepare these sorts of lists, which was helpfully provided at the end of the article. 24/7 Wall Street said it used a weighted index of 25 factors that fell into the categories of affordability, economy, community and quality of life.

That sounds like a lot, until you really think about it. That’s really not much data when you’re trying to determine something as complex as the “best” or “worst” place to live.

The article explained that Pueblo got low marks in areas such as its crime rate, poverty and access to grocery stores.

Crime rates, as we’ve said before, often are skewed by the manner in which they’re reported. A community with diligent law enforcement officers may appear to have a bigger crime problem than one where the reporting is more lax.

Also, access to grocery stores is an issue for some East Side neighborhoods, but it’s not a community-wide problem.

It’s hard to imagine that Pueblo didn’t score well on some of the article’s categories, such as housing affordability, average travel time to work or access to cultural and entertainment venues. Here’s where the weighting of the categories plays such a big role in determining a community’s score.

If you’re impoverished or live in a high-crime neighborhood, then of course those factors are important to you. But that certainly doesn’t describe everyone in Pueblo. If you’re doing OK financially and live in a relatively safe neighborhood, then you’d probably put greater importance on quality-of-life issues like cultural and entertainment options.

We can’t prevent people from publishing negative information about our community. What we can do, to the best of our abilities, is point out all of the positives and also try to put some of the negatives into perspective.

Pueblo’s a good place to live. Don’t let a study based on a limited number of cherry-picked factors convince you otherwise.