While citing poor advertising sales and a rough climate for selling magazine subscriptions, Time Inc executives said a key reason for closing the title was to divert resources to the company's six planned magazine launches this year, which include Real Simple, Time Digital and an Australian version of InStyle.

"It's a sad day, but if we were ever going to make a change, it was best to do it at time when we have plenty of open jobs," said Don Logan, Time Inc.'s chief executive officer.

Life was one of the cornerstones of Henry Luce's magazine empire and an early promoter of photojournalism. Indeed, its name is enshrined in the company's headquarters, which is still called the Time & Life Building. At its peak in 1969, Life had a circulation of 8.5 million readers.

But Life has long struggled to retain its relevance as television news and the Internet supplanted general-interest magazines. Time first shuttered the then-weekly magazine in 1972, only to relaunch it as a monthly in 1978. A series of editorial revamps in recent years aimed at saving the title, which lately had just 1.5 million guaranteed circulation, only served to confuse advertisers.

"It was difficult to understand the editorial direction," said Jack Irving, director of media in the New York office of ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Life ranked, "very, very low," on his list of magazines to use for clients, said Irving, in part because it didn't fit into any recognisable category.Life started making money again in the early 1990s, mostly through the creation of ancillary products like books and special issues. Logan said Life was currently "in the black." But company projections showed the magazine would be losing money by 2001.

Although industry executives have long been amazed that Life survived at all, its demise is a warning sign for other magazines with similar problems. Those include a reliance on newsstand sales, which are getting tougher as wholesalers consolidate, as well as the now-discredited sweepstakes companies. At risk: some of the women's magazines collectively known as the Seven Sisters, such as Hachette Filipacchi's Women's Day and Family Circle, published by Bertelsmann AG's Gruner & Jahr division.

Life counted on sweepstakes for a "significant" portion of its new subscribers, Logan said. Boosting circulation that way can help a magazine in the short term but drastically raises the cost of retaining subscribers who receive the magazine only after entering a contest. In addition, sales from sweepstakes have fallen off considerably in recent years following a series of lawsuits against the industry alleging deceptive advertising. After May, Life's operations will be subsumed by the Time magazine unit. Logan said most of Life's current employees will be offered jobs elsewhere in the company.

Life will continue to publish its line of books and occasional special issues of the magazine to commemorate significant events. The company is also mulling a Web site that could allow consumers to purchase any of the one million photographs that the magazine has in its archive.

Not much Life left

1936: Henry Luce launches Life magazine at 10 cents a copy.
Late 1930s: Life loses $50,000 a week and threatens to bankrupt Time Inc as demand outstrips the company's cost projections.
1952: Life is the first to publish Ernest Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea."
1961: Editor George Hunt introduces reporter bylines.
1963: The magazine switches its familiar red logo to black for the issue carrying the story of President John F Kennedy's assassination.
1969: Circulation hits a high of 8.5 million even as advertising falls.
1972: Weekly publication of Life is suspended, with issues appearing occasionally.
1978: Relaunched as a monthly. Circulation 700,000.
2000: Regular publication suspended again. Special issues to be produced.
Source: Time Inc