Rapscallion – good question, may worth be exploring if I get a bit of time. But a quick look at Google News suggests that the Telegraph and Guardian are up there too (226 and 171 mentions of cancer this past month, compared to 175 for the Mail). The Independent and the Express are much lower with 58 and 90 respectively. But bear in mind that Jade does sway the figures somewhat, these are all articles with the word ‘cancer’ in them, even if it isn’t the main focus (e.g. Michelle Obama visiting a cancer ward at a hospital), and it is total search results from Google News, so there may be duplicates or dud links. I haven’t the time to do anything systematic like I did with the Mail.

I suspect this is close to the reason, but not quite focused in the right way. It’s likely to be an editorial issue – a question of balancing the content of the newspaper, making sure that you don’t have too many stories on similar topics. So the cancer-related health stories may be more likely to be dropped when they’d be close to a Jade story in the paper, for fear of making it too cancer-heavy. I don’t know how many health stories are written solely for the Mail’s website, and how much just comes from the paper – it would be interesting to see if more of the stories during the Jade era were web originals rather than paper originals (the same restrictions not really applying on the web).

Out of interest, were the Mail’s total mentions of cancer on your Google News alert (i.e. including the ones you discarded for not being relevant to the blog) up, down, or roughly stable during the second 34 days? It’s also likely that lots of the ‘cancer slots’ (to use a somewhat inelegant shorthand) in the paper’s health coverage during that time might have been about screening, rather than cause/cure stories, so weren’t included on the (N)DMOOP.