Out of Town to Stop Selling NY Daily News

The owner of Out of Town News and Reading International yesterday agreed to stop selling the New York Daily News, after about 30 union supporters came to his office to object to his carrying the strike-bound newspaper.

The union supporters originally had planned to stage a protest in front of the Harvard Square newsstand at noon yesterday, but a union official met demonstrators and called off the protest shortly before it was to begin.

John S. Laughlin, assistant to the president of the Massachusetts AFLCIO, said union representatives decided to call off the protest because they had arranged talks between Sheldon Cohen, owner of Out of Town News, and the Newspaper Guild, one of the nine unions involved in the Daily News strike.

After speaking with the five would be-demonstrators who had gathered at Out of Town News, Laughlin and two of the union supporters walked to Cohen's Mass. Ave office, to request that he stop selling the News during the negotiations.

While Cohen met with Laughlin and Tom Robbins, a striking News reporter, almost 30 members of Harvard Business School's Trade Union program arrived in Cohen's second story office to show their support for the strike.

Cohen's announcement that he had ordered the News removed from his newstand and bookstore was met with whistles and cheers from the group.

"I myself am a union person," Cohen said. "We are not going to be carrying the News."

Cohen said he had not considered stopping sales of the paper before, but his own years as a union member made him sympathetic to the strikers. Cohen said he was member of the Teamsters union for 20 years when he drove a newspaper delivery truck.

After emerging from the meeting, Robbins said that Cohen had acted fast to discontinue sales of the News. "He picked up the phone while we were in the office and called his distributor. He said `We're not handling the News anymore,'" Robbins said.

Robbins, who was arrested in January after peacefully taking over a News editorial room in Brooklyn, said the demonstration planned for Harvard Square was part of a nation-wide effort by strikers to protest operations of the Tribune Comapny, the parent company of the Daily News.

Twenty-three thousands News workers took to the picket line three months ago. Since the beginning of the strike, production of the News has continued with replacement workers.