It's down to you, Marie Claire

As Sly Bailey, chief executive of IPC Media, gave a gung-ho speech yesterday on the glittering future of the company and how magazines are faring so much better than television stations in the face of a downturn in advertising, her headquarters back at King's Reach Tower was busy faxing out press releases announcing the closure of six of its magazine titles.

The downmarket weekly Your Life, launched six months ago, is closed immediately, as are Woman's Journal, Marie Claire Health and Beauty, Your Garden, Homes and Ideas and Practical Parenting's Complete Guide to Pregnancy, which will be returned to the womb of its parent title, Practical Parenting. This will result in 115 redundancies.

As the former editor of an IPC title, Nova, which was folded last May, I can imagine how gloomy the atmosphere there must be. The despair will probably spread to magazine offices all over London, as glossy workers everywhere wonder how safe their jobs are. Most magazine companies will probably stick it out, hoping that there's good news around the corner and that the fall of Kabul will perhaps buoy the market somewhat. IPC Media, however, always appears rather lily-livered when the going gets tough, never quite sure whether to prop or drop its less financially successful titles.

Last April, while I was still working for IPC, the editors and fashion directors of Loaded, Loaded Fashion, Woman's Journal, Marie Claire, Marie Claire Health and Beauty and Nova were flown out at vast expense to Milan in order to be part of a lavish presentation at the Four Seasons hotel to our Italian advertisers.

Sly Bailey gave a speech on how the magazines all had a glittering future, posters of our best covers were plastered all over the hotel's pillars and the day was deemed a great success. Bailey, who had poached me from The Sunday Times for the job at Nova, told me how much she had enjoyed the presentation, how much everyone had praised the magazines and what fun it would be to do the same thing in other fashion capitals. Two weeks later, Nova closed. Six months later, three of those six titles are now defunct.

Magazine publishing is a precarious business. What remains to be seen is whether this is a trend we'll see a lot more of over the next few months, or an unfortunate blip. IPC Media's Southbank division, responsible for four of the publications closed yesterday, must be pinning a lot of hope on its flagship title, Marie Claire. It's now the only fashion-based women's magazine they've got left.