Iconic news shop set to skip town

Out of Town? Try out of business.

For 24 years, the kiosk that houses Harvard Square’s Out of Town News offered passersby the world, offering a wide selection of international publications from France’s Le Monde to The Times of India. That era could end now that Hudson News, the owner of the iconic newsstand, recently notified the city of Cambridge it will not renew its lease past January due to a plunge in sales.

Out of Town News has been the hot spot for international print news since it moved to its Harvard Square location in 1984 after operating out of a kiosk at the entrance to the Harvard Square T station for almost three decades. The landmark newsstand carries a variety of international newspapers and publications flown in overnight from the previous day.

Out of Town News’s ability to bring in international news faster than most shops has become obsolete as more readers turn to the Internet, Hudson News spokeswoman Laura Samuels said.

‘Folks are getting news online and just not buying papers anymore,’ she said. ‘Numbers that brought us profits at this location can’t be sustained anymore.’

Hudson News, whose biggest stores offer up to 3,000 regional, national and international magazines and newspapers, according to its website, is working with Cambridge City manager Robert Healey to find possible remedies for the shop’s lack of sales, Samuels said.

‘We’re trying to come up with some situation where it might be possible [to keep the stand open],’ she said. ‘But realistically, we can’t keep it operating the way it is now.’

Samuels said Hudson News, which will leave its Cambridge location on Jan. 31, must still find a business that makes it profitable, regardless of’ the newsstand’s reputation as a city landmark.

‘We understand it’s a sensitive subject, because the stand is a quasi-historical landmark, and we hope it has a happy ending,’ Samuels said. ‘But we’re not in the museum business. We’re in the newsstand business, and we’ve got to act accordingly.’

The kiosk that houses Out of Town News was built in 1928 and is featured on the National Register of Historic Places. Because the building is on the NRHP, all changes in ownership or renovations must be carefully overseen by the city of Cambridge.

Cambridge officials are working to find alternative tenants to take over the stand, city spokesman Ini Tomeu said.

City officials are soliciting proposals from tenants who will provide services similar to that of Out of Town News.

The city will give preference to proposals that promise to provide ‘a richly diverse selection of publications and materials consistent with the diversity of the Cambridge population,’ or to companies with more than five years of experience in the newsstand business in an area similar to Harvard Square, according to Cambridge’s proposal outline.

‘It’s going to be a huge loss to no longer have such a wonderfully diverse variety of sources for people who like good, old-fashioned hard-copy papers,’ Harvard University Law School professor Charles Ogletree said. ‘It’s always been a great service for alumni and students and anyone walking through Harvard Square.’

Ogletree said the stand acted as a meeting place for ideas and opinions as diverse as the publications it sold.

‘It was a great place to have an intense conversation and overhear one, always on something timely and interesting,’ he said. ‘It’s such an integral part of the area. I can’t imagine it without it.’