Stop press: foreign daily newspaper deliveries to halt

Hard copy daily foreign newspapers will no longer be delivered to Dutch stores in the Netherlands from next year, according to the NRC.

Newspaper kiosks told the paper that already they cannot get copies of Belgian and Italian papers, but also The Guardian, Spain’s El País and the Swiss German Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

But from January 3 next year, NRC reports, there could be no more foreign daily papers delivered to shops in the Netherlands during the week at all.

Betapress, the single importer of foreign papers to the Netherlands, reportedly told its clients at the start of November that it was ‘stopping international papers from Monday to Friday from week 1, 2022’ because it was ‘no more economically responsible’ to continue with the daily print.

It reportedly said it would continue with Saturday deliveries. A spokesperson from parent company Audax told the NRC that the ‘dramatic decision’ was made against a background of ‘systematically increasing losses’, saying the coronavirus crisis had worsened the situation.

‘The paper stand is looking a bit shabby,’ staff member Martin Smit of Athenaeum news centre in Amsterdam told the NRC. ‘We used to have a huge number of foreign papers but now we’re covering up the holes with magazines.’

Efforts by its staff to convince the Guardian to resume daily deliveries came to naught, Anneke Reijnders added. ‘I sent them love letters for a year and a half. “We are such fans”, I wrote. “We love the book reviews which we read because Athenaeum is a bookshop as well.” But all I got was an automatic reply. So I wrote “Dear Automatic Reply, is there a person where you are?” I never had an answer.’

Smit added that digitalisation and high transport costs do make papers expensive but a city that thinks of itself as cosmopolitan should at least provide foreign press ‘to read with a cup of coffee in a café’.