I’m a bit annoyed about the Kerry Katona stories from this week.

Even though I wasn’t on FT duty this week, Heather called me up about the first story because she didn’t know whether or not we should run it. We’ve backed off from running a lot of stories about the likes of Kerry (or Jade Goody, numerous WAGs and other D-listers) in the past because they’re usually just saying something controversial/quote-worthy for the publicity and, well, we think that’s a bit sad. But we’ll run “genuine news” (ahem) about them - such as when Kerry was held captive during a break-in at her home recently. It was borderline but we decided a pregnancy was a good enough story to run.

Since we’d covered that, we then felt we had to run the miscarriage story the next day - and then, of course, when she found she hadn’t miscarried, we had to run that story too, else it would have stood (in our archives) that she’d lost the baby. But, having run all three stories, we feel a bit cheated. Each story was filled out with quotes from her publicist, Max Clifford, and we get the feeling the whole thing was staged: why announce a pregnancy so early if you know it’s potentially in trouble? why announce a miscarriage until doctors confirm it?

We’re glad she’s not lost the baby - because that would be horrible for all concerned - but we dislike how it’s been played for maximum attention/public sympathy/deals from magazines. Thousands of women experience miscarriages every week - a quarter of all pregnancies end in miscarriage in the first six weeks - and this feels like it’s exploiting their pain.

We want to cover as much news as possible - that’s one of our aims for the site - but the way we feel about this now, I suspect we’ll take a tougher line on this sort of story/celebrity in the future.