20 years since the death of Princess Diana

Me neither!

A lot of papers printed later editions that day. You can see the above image was a 1am edition, a Google image search reveals the pullout was removed from a later edition: http://i3.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article1722338.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/WA656042Sunday%20Mirror%20Front.jpg

There's also a midday edition of the Mirror I found on Google image search as well, so it would seem they ran out three editions that day, although I don't think all stockists got the later editions. I can remember I delivered newspapers at the time and after watching some of the Diana coverage when I woke up I went to the newsagent who was still waiting for some of the titles to be delivered as they had gone on late reprints. I can remember the Sunday Times was one paper that printed a 6am edition.

Yes, and it's lucky they did, because the old one wasn't really appropriate for this sort of news.

I would have thought that broadcasting live from St Paul's at short notice would be quite a technical logistical challenge - were there any already planned broadcasts from there over the Bank Holiday weekend?

Although it would perhaps have been more settling for young viewers to have had the more familiar look.

Dunblane would have been covered by that previous look...surely they altered the sequence for that?

I'm not sure - but St Pauls is a regular venue for broadcasts, and the BBC - at that time - had an in-house Outside Broadcast resources department (*) and would have been very familiar with how to set-up and rig for a broadcast at that venue. There will almost certainly have been a camera plan from a previous occasion that could be used as a model - and modified if need be.

Impressive - and hard work - but not unheard of. The BBC were - and are - quite good at this kind of thing.

(*) And to be fair even though the BBC no longer has an in-house OB dept, they still have a talented team of in-house and freelancers, and the third party resource providers they now work with are excellent.

Doesn't St Paul's have plug-in points for broadcast?

You mean wallboxes at strategic points inside for Triax/Multi-Mic etc rigging, like a major sports stadiums do, I'm not sure it does, and even less so 20 years ago ? The Albert Hall does, and has for a while, I heard one story that LWT (?)once turned up, expecting to use the BBC provided triax connectors, but they were a different standard.

There may be fibre connectivity to get the final signals out from the OB truck (though I think I've seen satellite uplinks used too), and in days gone by it may (not sure) have been on the old London 'LoCo' (London Coax) which was there for use by the BBC at lots of locations.

However that's a minor detail - the bigger issue in rigging those events it routing SMPTE fibres (or in rare cases triax) between individual cameras and the OB truck. That kind of cabling is integrated into some sports venues - but is far rarer in places like St Paul's, Westminster Abbey etc. However the team rigging these locations know what they are doing and have usually done it before...

Beware confusing a 'plug in point for broadcast' (which is usually just a way of plugging a single camera and some basic sound gear in to do a stand-up live) and a fully pre-rigged venue for multi-camera production. They are very different things.

As someone who used to put front pages together that Sunday Mirror front page doesn't look legit, it looks like it could be a Photoshop effort. Having said that, it's not impossible it could have been rushed together by whatever staff were still in the building at that time, with the later edition being put together when they'd scrambled some staff in.

The headline font on the Daily Mail looks a bit "off" to me too, maybe it is just as you said it being scrambled together, possibly by staff who weren't used to assembling front pages