“Diana’s dead. Get to Paris.”

This is what Stephen Farrell, then a Times of London reporter, now with The New York Times remembers being told the night of Princess Diana’s death.

“I was asleep at home in London and got a call around 4 or 5 a.m. from a news editor saying: “Diana’s dead. Get to Paris.” Click. I knew all the tabloids and TV would have all the flights booked so I drove off at high speed down the old Roman road to Dover, onto the car train, and at high speed through northern France,” he told the New York Times.

Farrell was among the number of reporters alerted at odd hours after the news of Diana’s car crash and death broke out. It was upsetting, sensational and unbelievable at the same time.

The media’s response to Diana’s death was massive, even drawing Queen Elizabeth II out for a formal statement.

But it was the media’s frenzy around Diana that was blamed for her eventual death.

Recalling the Day

As Christopher Andersen detailed in his book “The Day Diana Died,” Diana’s final day was spent with her boyfriend at the time, 42-year-old Dodi Fayed, a film producer and the son of billionaire Harrod’s owner Mohamed Al Fayed, a report by Today explained.

According to a yacht crewmember’s recollections to WWD, the couple arrived in Paris from Sardinia on August 30, 1997, after spending more than a week together yachting around the Mediterranean. They’d shared a meal that Saturday evening at the Ritz Paris, Fayed’s father’s grand…