Paper Monitor
11:16 UK time, Monday, 23 March 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
The face of a young woman, whose life was tragically cut short, stares out from the front page of the Times. But it's not the person you might expect.
Sylvia Plath was 30, only three years older than Jade Goody, when she took her own life in 1963.
And the Times reports a "new chapter" in the family tragedy with the news that her son Nicholas has now committed suicide. The paper has close links to the family, with Nicholas Hughes's sister Frieda a former columnist.
As well as the front page picture, there is a double-page inside recounting how hard it was for Plath's children and her husband Ted Hughes to escape the "personality cult" that sprung up around her memory. Yet it's equally hard to escape the conclusion such cults feed, in part, off media coverage - so, in devoting two pages to this latest tragic twist of events, some of those who until now were ignorant of the Plath-Hughes story will surely have had their morbid curiosity piqued.
The most high-profile death of the weekend came too late to make the Sunday papers, so Monday sees the first commemorations in print.
Leading the Jade story count is the Sun, which dedicates the first 10 pages to her, plus a 16-page pullout.
The only paper to avoid any mention on its front page is the Independent (Yes, even the Financial Times* notes it in its "News briefing"), although it makes up for this with three pages inside.
For those hankering after a digestible guide to reality TV's former star, Paper Monitor can recommend .
*As for the FT, Paper Monitor couldn't help but wonder how this international journal of business would relay the story to what might be presumed to be an audience largely ignorant of Goody's fame. The paper does a sound job of explaining who Goody was and why she made such an impact on British pop culture. But its scepticism is finally betrayed in the glib pay-off of the story's final paragraph:
"Optimists... thought Ms Goody's legacy would be a greater understanding of the need for early detection of cervical cancer: demand for smear tests has soared in recent weeks. Realists thought the public would be on to the next sensation within a month."
The 
