It's interesting that you think so. I knew various press men, in the 'sixties and into the early seventies, who started their shifts with a Rolleiflex, a flash and five rolls of film. If it was a really busy day, they might take ten rolls.
35mm press work in Britain didn't take off until the mid 'seventies, so far as I recall. There were people like Victor Blackman, who wrote a column in Amateur Photographer, that eulogised the Nikon system for press work but that level of investment was pretty much limited to Fleet Street. When I worked on a local paper in the London suburbs, around '68, our chief photographer carried a Canon 7. On the other hand, he was considered a dangerous radical. 😀