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But since the bursting of the dotcom bubble, the sector has had a wretched time. Many commentators expected an advertising revival this year, but the shift of spending to the internet has harmed many traditional companies.

Levin, a former Bain management consultant who was previously chief executive of Symbian, the mobile-phone software company, is characteristically clear on the strategic challenge.

“Media is terribly unloved,” he said. “All the [internet] promise of 1998 is coming through suddenly now, provoking blank stares of astonishment. Investors don’t know what businesses will survive.”

()Despite the widespread uncertainty, investors are not entirely undiscriminating, as UBM’s own stock-market performance shows. “There’s a difference between the people who have moved forward and whose business models have changed, and those who have not,” said Levin.

In a way, Levin’s job has been made easier by the ramshackle collection of assets he inherited from Lord Hollick, whom he succeeded in April 2005. UBM was the rump of Hollick’s ambitions to build a television company — it owned a 35% stake in Five and a 20% holding in ITN, along with the market- research company NOP, press-release distribution firm PR Newswire, Exchange & Mart and an unfashionable collection of trade titles. Levin’s son likes to tell his friends his father is responsible for Tissue World, the leading authority in the loo-roll industry.

The very lack of fit between these businesses made it easier for Levin to decide on his own way forward. Out went NOP, the stake in Five and Exchange & Mart, raising a total of almost £750m.

That left a group largely comprising PR Newswire, a highly profitable American business growing strongly thanks to increasing financial-disclosure requirements; and the CMP publishing and conferences arm, which faces a much more difficult environment.

UBM’s challenge is to reduce its dependence on advertising — still responsible for 46% of group revenues last year, according to Man Securities — and build its online businesses, which generated only 8% of group sales.

Levin has said he will spend up to £250m on small bolt-on acquisitions. The easier part of this is building up the events and conferences that often run side-by-side with trade magazines. Trade shows aimed at bringing industry people together are, by their nature, protected from the impact of the internet.

The £65m acquisition of Medialive, along with other purchases, has made UBM the world’s biggest organiser of technology events. Through CMP Asia, the group is also the third-biggest trade-show company in the region. After recent purchases, conferences and events now contribute close to 40% of group sales, having more than doubled in size in the past 18 months.

The more difficult task is generating new revenue streams for CMP’s print titles, which include Building, Travel Trade Gazette and Music Week. Magazines that generated healthy profits for many years are now having to rethink their businesses as never before.

Levin said Pulse’s launch of Search Medica was “one of many experiments. There will be some trial and, no doubt, some error”.

This requires a big cultural change for UBM, many of whose businesses have previously prospered thanks to tight management of costs and the avoidance of unnecessary risk. That will no longer be enough.

Levin said he had made “a huge amount of effort around culture, reorientating the business towards thinking about emerging markets”. One result of this is that, with the exception of CMP Asia, all the divisions have new bosses. “I wanted people who were open to the new,” said Levin. “It’s really important that the culture of the business . . . allows and encourages people to experiment and try things.”

Some critics believe the scale of the risks are overlooked, but Levin offers reassurance. “What we are trying is lots of small experiments — it’s not all on one spectacular initiative,” he said.

“There are many, many initiatives. Inevitably, some of them are not going to work. The good news is that we have got a pretty good control framework that says, ‘should we keep trying it or not?’ ”

Levin is keen to stress there is still a role for print media. However, the future lies in moving beyond journalism and even directories. As with Search Medica, the intention is to create tools that make UBM’s products part of the daily job for the focused groups of users that they serve.

UBM’s bet is that there is a good business here. But it is a very different kind of media to the one that we’re used to.