I was not a friend of Katherine Ward, the lawyer whose leap from a fourth floor hotel window to her death in January was captured in graphic photographs splashed all over three newspapers. But I know someone who was.
Imagine how this friend felt when she opened up the Evening Standard and found pictures of her friend Katherine standing rigid on a hotel balcony and then captured in a mid air plummet to her death.
I imagine shock and angry would have exacerbated the grief.
Today the Press Complaints Commission said it regretted the publication of the pictures had upset readers - but dismissed their complaints against the Sun, the Times and the Evening Standard.
The PCC said that the papers had not breached the code about intruding into grief and shock in running the pictures. Even though arguably they were in bad taste - the PCC said this was not its jurisdiction.
But avoiding ruling on matters of taste and decency, which is beyond its remit, while determining intrusions into grief and shock, which the PCC does under clause five of its code, seems to me a very delicate dance around a very fine line.
The PCC did criticise the Standard for identifying the woman while there was still a chance her family and friend did not know about her death.
Bad though its behaviour was, the Standard has a partial journalist defence of reporting an incident on its patch. What on earth prompted the Times, of all newspapers, to put a portrait photograph of this woman on its front page, and follow up the story inside with yet more photographs?
Media commentator Roy Greenslade's thesis is that the PCC was right to dismiss the complaints but the editors were wrong to publish the images.
Suicide has always been a difficult subject for the media to cover - not the least because of the very valid concern that the prominent reporting of suicide can increase suicide risk in vulnerable people - copycat suicides.
The Samaritans charity joined others in complaining to the PCC about the photographs. While its complaint was dismissed some of its criticism hit home as the PCC is to examine its code in relation to the reporting of a suicide.
In life Ms Ward was not a remotely newsworthy figure. Would Mr Thomson of the Times, Ms Wade of the Sun and Ms Wadley of the Evening Standard care to explain just what was so vital in the reporting of her death?
