“MADDY: IT’S NOT HER”, “GROWING FEAR OVER MISSING SCHOOLGIRL”, “I MARRIED A MONSTER”. Ah, the human angle. Splattered all over a front page near you. And not just the front page of newspapers, either; the weekly shoes-slebs-and-shock mags pride themselves on their lifestyle stories, meaning sad tales of death, betrayal and small, sick kids. Internet news gives you regular updates on the abduction of toddlers, the gang rape of teenagers, the casual murder of a father by a bunch of drunken children. Even serious, grown-up news – the BBC, Channel 4 – is spending longer and longer on stories designed to get under your skin. When Steve “The Suffolk Strangler” Wright was found guilty last week, Channel 4 News spent forty minutes on it, giving us childhood pictures of the murdered women, interviews with their parents and siblings, one word answers from his dad and his step-mum.

Of course, we know why such stories make headlines. First: they’re shocking. And second: we can all relate, you know. The stories that scream “It Could Be You”, and “There But For The Grace” are the ones with most impact, because we can imagine (we think we can imagine) how we would feel in such a situation. It’s almost exciting. By consuming them we become exhilaratingly close and we’re transformed into near-misses, like the people who caught the tube safely on July 7th 2005. So, we watch the latest non-news about Madeleine McCann, and we clutch our children harder to us. We hear about a grown man killed by teenagers and we vow never to talk to another youth again. We just want to be safe.

Such stories have always been around, of course, but over the past 15 years they’ve come to dominate. This is because the news business is obsessed with attracting women readers and female viewers. Why? Because women mean classier advertising. Papers and telly don’t get the high-paying designer ads unless the designers are hitting their target, female audience. Unfortunately for the media, women, traditionally, turn away from news. And the tried-and-tested come-here-ladies formula is to offer the human angle. That’s not to say that men don’t get upset by tragic stories – of course they do – but in the snapshots of news, it’s the clichés that fight their way to the top. Women as mothers, as sex-pots, as too fat/too thin/unmarried/unhappy people – those are the tedious roles played out over and over, in a never-ending movie of wanton pop singers, loving mothers, brave tots and feckless binge-drinkers. The Daily Mail is the most successful at this: every news story is given a female-friendly spin – friendly in the very loosest sense – and it has been rewarded by gaining the highest proportion of women readers in the newspaper market.

Women-friendly news has given us celebs with cellulite, which is bad enough. But it has also given us a regular, overwhelming supply of terribly upsetting personal tales. And I can’t handle it. Call me sentimental, but the Madeleine McCann story has, at times, kept me awake at night. Not because I think it’s going to happen to me, but because I feel so desperately sorry for her parents. I have the same reaction to Doreen Laurence, mother of Steven; to Karen Matthews, Shannon’s mum; to Zoe and Amy Newlove, daughters of Gary; to anyone prepared to venture into the flashbulbs’ glare in the desperate hope that, by doing so, they might get justice for someone they love. Their dignity, their anger, their grief all haunt me.

But I can’t do anything. Not to help them, not to stop what has happened to them. Nothing. Maybe news, in this multi-media day and age, is forced to take on the narrative qualities of drama in order to have an impact. But there is rarely a happy ending to these tales. Because the human angle, the upsetting story, does nothing other than make us worried, sad and impotent. Which is no state for anyone to be in, but is especially galling when you know that these tales are deliberately aimed at women. At least, with football news, there’s the occasional win.