I glance at those headlines while waiting at the supermarket checkout and those regular reports about Mary or Nicole are a source of amusement to me. I know that there are people out there who believe them. My late mother was one of them. She'd read it and comment on the "news" yet never follow through with questions months later when the promised babies didn't eventuate. I came to think that she and other readers treat those magazines as a form of entertainment somewhere between fact and fiction and suspend disbelief when it comes to what they read there.
Do the readers of Woman's Day and New Idea buy the magazines just because of the photos of the children? Maybe, maybe not. But the fact that that sort of photo is in there is part of the identity of the package that the magazines present.
I'm glad New Idea and Woman's Day haven't kowtowed to the Mountbatten/Windsor/Wales pressure to not publish candid, non-official, photographs of the children. I reckon that if members of the RF choose to venture outside their crenellated battlements and mingle with the hoi polloi, they are subject to the same rules that apply to the rest of us and shouldn't be treated any differently. If they or their kids venture out into public places, they are likely to be photographed. They know there is a particular interest in them and their children, and they foster it. Indeed they need this interest. Their continued enjoyment of their privileged position requires continued interest in them. They have a symbiotic relationship with the public and they need to remain of interest, and being of interest involves getting publicity, and getting publicity includes people taking photographs of them, and the photographers who take snaps of the kiddies occupy an essential niche in the system. It would do the Royals no good for the public to not care enough about them to want to see photographs of them.
I don't approve of photographers crawling through dense hedges or scaling walls to take photographs of goings-on on private property that cannot be seen from public spaces without ladders, or trespassing to do so. If someone slithers under or through a bush and photographs the royals in places where anyone would have a reasonable expectation of privacy, that's poor form and grounds for complaint if not flat out prosecution, but if the kids are in a public place and easily seen from a public place by any passer by, and someone takes a photo from a distance without bothering them, I see no reason whatsoever why that photo should not be published.
