Media Princess

Princess Diana's death in a car crash after being chased by the unpopular paparazzi was one of the biggest news stories of the 1990s. It was a tragic fairy tale perfectly timed for the advent of the celebrity age. The global outpouring of grief and outrage grew for days and the media that had provided the public with images of her daily for years became aware of just how much this beautiful celebrity princess and mother had taken root in people's hearts. Angus Gillies was a fairly new, fairly young producer of a news programme called Nightline in New Zealand when the story broke. He was also doing a course on fiction writing at Auckland University. But when he tried to write, all that would come out were his experiences as a novice producer trying to do justice to one of the most incredible news stories of the 20th century. Media Princess is what he wrote, an attempt to reconcile the media frenzy and mass mourning over Princess Diana's death and his own limited personal experiences of death.