The Bully leaves the playground: Various attempts to breathe new life into the magazine failed. Laurie Oakes has written a political column in The Bulletin for the past 24 years. He lamented the decision to shut it down, but said it was not a shock. “I know that it hasn’t been profitable for a long time and I guess when you think about it, it’s not surprising,” he said. “It doesn’t make it any less upsetting.” — Woolly Days

The Bulletin closing down! A pointless, gossipy media post… Sad news, obviously, but I can’t help but wonder what Tim Blair might have to say about this. Blair was a freelance contributor to The Bulletin, and then assistant editor, for a period of several years. When I first started reading his blog, maybe in late 2001, he was associated with the magazine, and he only broke that association off in 2007, to take up a job as opinions editor at the Daily Telegraph. After Blair left, he made a few posts alluding to staffing and organisation troubles at The Bulletin, like this one, where he runs a snippet from a news item about the magazine, and notes that ‘The place ain’t happy, for lots of reasons.’ I can’t help but wondering if he’d guessed, beforehand, that the magazine wasn’t going to last much longer. — Will type for food

Final Bulletin. Apart from the time I spent working in London, I’ve lived pretty much all of my adult life in Melbourne. Over the years I’ve seen many magazines come and go, as well as two newspapers. Today though sees the end of an icon of Australian publishing, the weekly news magazine The Bulletin. I was shocked when I heard of its closure this morning. It’s such a well respected journal. Our very own Economist. And it’s been a part of Australian life for 128 years. Oh well. As Ned Kelly once said – such is life. — Brand DNA 

The Bulletin crosses my desk but I rarely open it. Awful design, tiring just to look at it. Trying to think of something similar looking I just compared it to The New Statesman – but NS is slightly larger, the pages have a cooler look, and the sections are more defined. Pity they didn’t try a new format – maybe monthly, with articles that didn’t date so quickly. The Bulletin looks like something you wouldn’t choose to pick up in the dentist’s waiting room. Given that they would have thousands of certain library subscriptions, they might have been able to keep the prestige of having the magazine while producing a cheaper, yet classier product. — Russell comments on “Death of print: Vale The Bulletin” at Larvatus Prodeo

Whodunnit? There’s been a lot of buzz around the death of the Bulletin in the past 12 hours, but the emergent theme is that the internet killed it. Why would people wait a week for in-depth news and commentary when they have the internet? one pundit pondered. Why indeed? But it has to be more than just the internet that did it in — after all, it DID have a web site. — KerryJ’s blog