News that an Australian institution was closing seemed to come from a very outside source.

The announcement that The Bulletin was closing was handed down from Scotsman Adrian MacKenzie, managing partner of Hong Kong private equity fund CVC Asia Pacific, to American Scott Lorson, chief executive of Australian Consolidated Press. The Bulletin, Australia's longest-running magazine, was founded in 1880.

“Welcome to the brave, but soulless, new world,” John Lyons, of The Australian, wrote Friday.

The Bulletin's closure was announced in Sydney Thursday. Its last edition was published Wednesday.

ACP's Lorson blamed the magazine's closure on low circulation numbers, as the most recent figures of 57,039 is about half of what they were in the mid-1990s. He also blamed the “impact of the Internet” and the increasing popularity of current affairs magazines, Asia Media reported Thursday.

“This is a sad day for all of us at ACP Magazines. The Bulletin has been an institution in Australian publishing and has provided its loyal readers with the best quality, in-depth news and current affairs analysis in the country,” Lorson said in a statement.

ACP Magazines was part of the former Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd's media empire, remained PBL Media, owned by the Packer family. James Packer sold 75 percent of the media group to CVC Asia Pacific in 2007, according to Asia Media.

“Having worked full time on The Bulletin in the late 1990s and continuing to write for it until last year, I gained a sense of what the magazine meant for both the Australian public and the Packer family. It says everything about who now controls what used to be the Packer empire - a private equity company called CVC Asia Pacific - that the matriarch of the family, Ros Packer, was not even given the courtesy of a phone call to tell her that the magazine that had been at the centre of her family's media empire had been closed. She found out, by accident, when she turned on her television at 2 p.m.,” wrote Lyons, for The Australian.