The Press The Papers Wanted? The Case of Post-War Newsprint Rationing in the Netherlands and Britain.

In the beginning of 1947 Kingsley Martin published his vision of the press as it was and as it should be in The Press the Public Wants. Whoever wanted the tiny papers of the late 1940s? No one, it would seem, least of all the newspapers themselves who complained they could not function in the way they should, due to the inadequate supply of newsprint. Newsprint rationing seems to have been even more controversial in the Netherlands than in Britain. This article probes the similarities and differences between the situation of the daily press in Britain and the Netherlands, after World War II with particular reference to the scarcity of newsprint, in order to understand some of the dynamics of media structure. An important explanatory factor in the matter of a response to the newsprint restrictions may have been the degree of commercialization of the press as a whole, and of particular newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]