Certainly, it wasn’t perfect: there was a dalliance with numbered lists that weren’t done nearly as well as BuzzFeed, and relatively strict requirements on word length (News Magazine features rarely runs more than 1,000 words) meant that the occasional feature was more superficial than it could have been, but that section of the site served a purpose: explain the things that procedural news reports didn’t have the time or space to do, and better inform the reader as they navigated through the daily deluge of news. And most importantly, it did this for literally pennies (the entire online arm of the BBC, of which News Magazine was only a small part, costs each household 61p per month).

But it did other things, too. The News Magazine allowed writers to cover stories that others simply wouldn’t. My first story for the site was looking at the lives of competitive strongmen; one of my last was on the lives of those who skated in spite of a nationwide ban in Norway in the 1970s and 1980s. Neither of those stories are a vital public service, but they (hopefully) do what the best features can: pose interesting questions about odd corners of everyday lives, and present to readers unexpected, or new, views on our culture. The perfect example is one story I imagine will be regularly cited in the coming days: Helena Lee’s story on Finnish baby boxes.

Clearly, I’m biased. I have a horse in this race. I’m disappointed to be losing a stream of potential income, though not a large one: when I first met with its editors in New Broadcasting House, I was warned that as a public service broadcaster, accountable to the people for its spending, payment would pale in comparison with the BBC’s competitors. It did, and still does. But as well as an irregular contributor, I was — like literally millions of Britons — also a regular consumer of the BBC News Magazine.

From the outside looking in, the BBC News Magazine fulfilled the three Reithian principles that exemplify why we need a publicly-funded British state broadcaster: it informed, it educated, and it entertained.

Why it’s being shuttered when it does everything the BBC is meant to stand for is a question I’d like to have answered. Sadly, with the closure of the News Magazine, there’ll soon no longer be a place in the British media that will answer that question — the important context behind this decison — for me.