Crime reporter’s journey from smoke-filled newsrooms to being ‘the guy from Tiktok’
Veteran crime reporter Mark Morri regaling SXSW audiences with stories from the Daily Tele newsroom of old
When Mark Morri joined the Daily Telegraph in 1980 as a copy boy, news reporting was an entirely different beast.
For 45 years the Daily Telegraph’s crime editor has worked out of the same Holt Street building in Sydney, for the same publisher — but everything else about the day-to-day mechanics of Morri’s job has completely changed.
Morri regaled audiences with nostalgic newsroom stories on Thursday afternoon at a SXSW Sydney session titled Typewriter to TikTok.
“When I first walked in, the thing that hit me was it was so noisy – and there was smoke everywhere,” he said of the News Corp building. “Nearly everybody was smoking, and there were a few people that had obviously just come straight back from the pub. It was a totally different environment.
“The noise was unbelievable. You could hear typewriters going everywhere, and people screaming out ”copy’.”
The ‘copy’ call was to summon junior copy boys like Morri, who would be tasked with anything from going to get a paper file for a journalist, to fetching coffees or feeding a parking meter. Out the front of the News Corp building, a row of trucks crowded the street, waiting for the latest edition of the paper, which was still printed on site multiple times a day.
“Every so often, every few hours, the building would rumble,” Morri continued. “And that meant that the paper was off, the edition was off, and then you’d see a whole lot of journalists going off to go for the pub for the next 20 minutes – and then come back to put out the next edition. It was just like a rolling film that never stopped.”
The Daily Telegraph was a far larger beast in the early ’80s, with four editions a day, each updated as the news developed or became stale throughout the day.
Morri recalled the first wave of staffers would arrive at 4.30am, with the first edition rolling off the presses at 7am. As he moved into crime reporting, he was often knocking on doors at 5.30am in the morning to get a photo of the relative of someone who had recently been killed, before rushing the film back, to be developed on site, then placed into the 9.30am edition.
“They were printing like, sometimes 700,000 papers a day, four times a day. And then the Telegraph, which was the morning paper, it printed a few hundred thousand, it printed at night.
The first big crime story that Morri covered was a bikie shoot-out in September 1984 that resulted in seven deaths, including a 15-year-old bystander, and 28 injuries. As the details of the story were still emerging, Morri was racing towards the scene of the shoot-out, a pub carpark in Milperra, in Sydney’s West. The cabbie refused to go near it, instead dropping him a few blocks from the crime scene.
“No-one had been arrested, there were just bikies everywhere, and there was blood all over the car park. I was only 23, 24 when it happened … that was the first time we’d ever really heard about bikers in Australia. And now we’re reporting daily on bikers.”
Morri recalls that access to crime scene was far easier when he was coming up. “Police weren’t anywhere near as interested in keeping control in the media … we could get really close. There are photos of guys leaning over bodies, that’s how close the photographers got.
“I do remember a camera crew, one of the TV trucks was shot at. Yeah, we got very close back in those days.”
Morri has been at the Daily Telegraph for 45 years
Morri said the competition between journalists was much fiercer in the 1980s as well. An older journalist once advised him, if a story broke in a small town: arrive first, break every public phone aside from the one in the local pub, then pay the publican to be the only one allowed to use it.
Communications were limited. There were ten ’rounds cars’ that basically acted as taxis to ferry photographers and drivers around the city from job to job, with two-way radios used to dictate the breaking news to someone dutifully typing the story up back in the office. Although it set a frantic pace, Morri misses the days of those on-call drivers.
“It was fantastic. I tell you. They’d hang outside pubs while you’re in there talking to contacts, drive you around, it was fantastic.”
He also misses the day of having to physically chase stories. He feels it adds an extra dimension to the reporting that mere online research and document parsing cannot achieve.
“You had to knock on the door of parents to talk to them,” he said of murder victims. “You had to go out with the police. There was a lot more interaction, face-to-face, to cover such tragic stories back then.”
In 2022, the Daily Telegraph’s chief reporter Josh Hanrahan was tooling around on Tiktok, and noticed a crime-focused account had taken a down-the-barrel video of Morri explaining a crime, originally uploaded to the Tele’s Youtube channel, and re-uploading it to Tiktok.
The video had been watched by over a million times, and Hanrahan quickly realised the masthead needed its own Tiktok presence.
Now, Morri is one of the biggest drawcards on the Daily Telegraph’s Tiktok, which has 931,000 followers, and over 31 million video ‘likes’.
@dailytelegraph Crime Editor Mark Morri talks to the Sydney man who found the latest blocks of cocaine washed up on a Sydney beach. Story link in bio #sydneycrimenews #mswpolice #sydney
Morri credits Hanrahan — who often joins him in the videos — with “revolutionising the way we were reporting”.
“I didn’t even know what Tiktok was,” Morri recalled. “I thought it was those things you put in your mouth for good breath”.
The video format allows for quick, easy and breezy reporting — and for instant virality.
“We’re still covering crime, very much the old-fashioned way,” Morri hastened to explain. “But we’re talking to new audiences, in a new way.”
For most of Morri’s career, he could report in relative anonymity, with a stamp-sized black-and-white photo next to his articles the only public record of his image. In the digital age, this has changed somewhat.
“All of a sudden, I go to places now where young people — who would just normally probably stand up and give me a seat — recognise me and say, ‘Gee, you’re the guy from Tiktok!”
