Who'd be a publisher? Particularly an IT magazine publisher. Particularly now.

Magazine publishing is a fickle business, dependent largely on the whims of the consumer. Wander into a newsagent and you're presented with a massive range of brightly coloured magazines, all vying for your attention and cash. Sometimes you'll buy, sometimes you won't. If money's tight, you won't.

That's the first problem that magazine publishers face. When mortgage rates go up, or there's a hint of recession, or petrol/alcohol/tobacco taxes are increased, magazine sales suffer. Magazines are not essential (unlike beer and fags), which is why publishers are so keen on subscribers, who represent a guaranteed audience for advertisers.

And that's the second problem. In the current economic climate, many companies are still reeling from the stupidly high sums of money invested in Web sites, either their own or other people's. So belts have been tightened since the beginning of the year. And when budgets are reduced, the first things to go are marketing, PR and advertising, daft as it will seem to anyone with a basic knowledge of market economics.

So, fewer people are buying magazines, and fewer companies are advertising in those magazines. The result is that there's less money coming in, at which point the publishers reduce the editorial budget.

Along comes problem number three. Smaller editorial budgets means less content in the magazines. That in turn leads to visibly thinner magazines, which means that fewer people buy them, especially as the cover price often goes up at the same time. Therefore there's a smaller potential audience for advertisers, so the advertising revenue goes down. So the editorial budget is shrunk again.

And so it goes on, in a vicious circle. Eventually you'd get to the stage where the entire magazine costs £19.99 and is twenty pages thick with no adverts. It never gets that far, though; the publishers pull the plug as soon as things start to look a bit wobbly.

Last night was the 'wake' for PC Direct magazine, which has now closed (although, perversely, the September issue will be the last one on the shelves - in late July). I have a soft spot for PC Direct because it's the first magazine I worked on, as a lowly labs rat back in 1994, and I've written for it on a regular basis since then. But it had become an anachronism, unsuited to a world where PCs are, for many people, just retail consumer electronics like DVD players, home hi-fi systems and flat-screen televisions.

PC Direct isn't the only recent casualty, and all the IT publishers are suffering to a greater or lesser extent. Niche titles - those aimed at corporate IT managers, for example - should survive, but the future of the 'PC Blah' news-stand title is decidedly shaky. The same problems are affecting TV and the Web, too, with IT sites closing* and specialist IT satellite TV channels going off the air.

And what of the PC Direct staff? Redundancy beckons for some, in-house reshuffles for others. But they went out in style; taking over a Soho pub and drinking until their legs gave way. Some didn't stop even then. Photos taken at the event will be coming soon to a Web site near you.