Paul Fenn went from newspapers to lead a golden era of television

Paul ‘Foghorn’ Fenn loved news.

Paul Fenn: Journalist, sportsman.

Born NSW, October 17, 1945; died Sydney, August 19, aged 75.

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Paul Fenn was very much larger than life, so he enlarged his life to fit. He was good at sport; you couldn’t stop him. He loved newspapers and television news; you couldn’t stop him. He couldn’t sing; you couldn’t stop him.

He was a copyboy on The Daily Mirror in Sydney, only a few years after it had been sold by Ezra Norton, first to Fairfax (which already owned The Sun) and then to News Ltd. The ferocity of the competi­tion between those mastheads from then on is legendary.

Barely 18, Fenn worked in the telex room. They are gone now, but these were once a newspaper’s window on the world. A bank of teleprinters would constantly chat with news in a deafening staccato chorus of fast-paced key strokes. Reports arrived in numbered “takes” and seldom in order. You had to tear off the takes and collate the stories while feeding the beasts more paper. It was endless.

But it had an occasional reward. News was classified by six levels of importance: country race results arrived with a single bell. A road death might attract two “tings” and so on. Perhaps four times each year you’d hear six bells – a big story.

At 4am one Saturday, and almost 14,000km away, another young man was about to make a name for himself. Within minutes Fenn – alone at the Mirror office – heard six bells. President John Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. The teleprinters moved up a gear, six-bell reports coming every few minutes.

Fenn gathered the various takes of one of the stories of the century and collated them, but only after alerting the editor and senior staff. He set about pulling together an obituary of JFK’s crowded life from cuttings he’d retrieved from the library. (He’d have been well-schooled at home; dad Merv was a journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald.)

The Mirror had 80,000 copies on the street before anyone at The Sun had pulled on their socks. Inside was Fenn’s well-crafted obit. Days later he had a cadetship and was on his way.

By then he was an accomplished rugby player, first at junior level and later with Manly where he played 176 grade games, 23 first grade, won the reserve’s premiership in 1967 and was later captain. He twice played the All Blacks in 1968, with a combined ACT team and an Australian Services side.

He worked as a reporter on The Mirror for four years until summoned for National Service, serving time in the media corps for two years from 1967. He returned to Sydney to work on The Telegraph, but a few years later was back at the Mirror where he met and mentored Mike Munro.

“I first met him when I played football against him in the Journos’ Cup, as a know-nothing hopeless winger for the Daily Mirror Bloodstains,” said Munro.

“Facing down Paul Fenn running at you at full speed put the fear of God into me.”

In his Telegraph years, Fenn wrote general news and features and, of course, became a noted sports writer. It was there he was dubbed Foghorn. Former long-time News Corp editor Ian Moore remembered that Fenn “would break into an ear-splitting, pub-clearing, tuneless version of You’ll Never Walk Alone”. Other songs in his bare repertoire included High Noon and Rubber Ducky.

The nickname stuck when he returned to the Mirror and, coincidentally, both Munro and Fenn were courted by Channel 10. Munro put them off awhile, but on returning from News Corp’s New York bureau moved to television. So did Fenn. They left the Mirror on the same day in 1978, Munro to do 6am police rounds, Fenn as chief of staff.

Both prospered in the new environment, Munro in front of the camera, Fenn bulkily behind it. Both moved on to Nine and so started the golden era of that network’s dominance of news and current affairs as Fenn was promoted to deputy news director and chief of staff, then Sydney news director and later national news director.

With Peter Meakin as head of news and current affairs, and the late Brian Henderson reading the nightly news, Nine rated its way to history. On the way Fenn hired and helped the likes of Peter Overton, Liz Hayes and others.

Tragedy struck in 1988 when Robyn, his wife of 19 years, died of complications from melanoma, but Fenn juggled his demanding roles while raising his young children, Simon and Hayley.

“He was fair,” recalled Munro. “And he didn’t bullshit. If he didn’t like what you were telling him he’d let you know. ‘You’re kidding me,’ he’d say.”