WHEN she was a young risk analyst at Costain, the engineering group, Carolyn McCall relied on three publications to keep her informed.

Fresh from completing a degree in politics, having turned her back on a career in teaching, she pored over the Financial Times, the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Middle Eastern Economic Digest (MEED).

“They were my three bread-and-butter reads,” she said.

Now, some 22 years on, as chief executive of the Guardian Media Group (GMG), McCall has just welcomed one of those weighty tomes into her media empire.

She sees MEED as one of the jewels in the group’s crown, acquired as part of the takeover of business publisher Emap Communications, which was completed last week.

In partnership with the private-equity firm Apax, GMG, best known for its left-leaning Guardian and Observer newspapers, paid £1.1 billion to own trade shows such as Interbuild and magazines including Health Service Journal and Retail Week.

But it is the properties with reach outside Britain and that have little reliance on the fickle advertising market that McCall is most excited about. These include the fashion-industry website WGSN, the Cannes Lions advertising festival and MEED Projects, a database spun off from the magazine that tracks construction activity in the Middle East. “Emap gets 60% of its revenues from data or events. The most important thing for us is to expand in these high-growth areas,” she said.

McCall is delighted to have pulled off the deal, particularly after Emap chairman Alun Cathcart originally decided not to sell because bids were not high enough.

“It nearly slipped out of our grasp,” she said. “If they had decided to keep it, it would have been 18 months before it would have come up again.” She “raised the stakes a little bit” to win the day.

To lead the business, its new owners last week poached David Gilbertson, the chief executive of Informa. The move was a blow to the owner of shipping title Lloyd’s List because it broke up a decade-long partnership with chairman Peter Rigby. Informa shares fell 9% on the news.

The bigger issue was that the appointment of Gilbertson made it crystal clear there was no immediate plan to combine Emap with Incisive Media, another business publisher majority owned by Apax and a deal that makes eminent sense.

True, there is little logic in attempting to refinance cheaper debt put in place before the credit crunch for Incisive’s purchase of The American Lawyer magazine.

Separate rumours had been circulating that GMG was cutting up rough over the price at which it was prepared to buy into Incisive, particularly after stumping up the extra cash to seal the Emap buy. Not true, said McCall. “It was not a valuation issue,” she said. “If Apax really wanted to do it at that particular time, we would have done it.”

Instead, McCall wants a period of calm for the business, which had been unsettled by the stop-start auction. Gilbertson will have time to get his feet under the table and draw up his own plan, including acquisitions.

“If Incisive is one of those acquisitions we will all get around the table to see if we can make that happen,” McCall added. But she cautioned: “Mergers are notoriously complicated. They can leak value and are very hard to pull off.”

That leaves Apax in the odd position of owning two business publishers without being able to squeeze out savings. With Reed Elsevier’s trade publishing arm being marketed for sale next month, theoretically they could become rivals. McCall thinks not. “I can’t ever imagine getting into a position where they are bidding against themselves.”

She knows Apax well. A year ago, the firm bought a half share in Trader Media Group, owner of Autotrader, from GMG – McCall’s first move since her appointment in August 2006 to diversify away from businesses that rely heavily on advertising. That gave her the £675m pot she is currently spending. Some will be tucked away into a low-risk investment fund.

Selling out of Trader completely will come back on the agenda in the next two or three years, she said.

“There will come a time when we will look at an exit for Trader Media. Then we will have a lot of cash on the table [for further deals].”

With no shareholders to answer to, GMG’s shuffling of investments is designed to protect its most precious asset.

The company is owned by the Scott Trust, whose mission statement is “to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity”.

GMG made a £97.7m pretax profit in the year to April 2007, on sales of £716m. Within that, The Guardian, Observer and associated websites made a loss of £14.3m.

With an array of other assets to prop it up, does it matter if the titles never make a profit again?

“As a trustee, I would say that as long as Guardian News & Media [the national newspaper and website division] is running itself efficiently and effectively, profitability is not the number one reason for owning it,” McCall said.

“As a chief executive, I think it is good for businesses to be in profit. The Guardian is not losing a great deal compared to the competition, including The Independent.”

However, she concedes that Guardian News & Media will not make a profit for at least the next two years because of the advertising slowdown.

GMG’s remaining assets look likely to be swept up in McCall’s regime change at some stage. It has 13 regional radio stations, primarily under the Smooth Radio, Real Radio and Century FM banners. She insists the group could still be a buyer or seller in the future, but sat out the auction of Emap’s radio assets and Virgin Radio, and did not intervene in GCap Media’s imminent takeover, either.

McCall is wary of big moves, notably in the London market she describes as “cluttered”. As regards advertising its stations to win new listeners, she said: “For London, for Smooth, it’s like pouring money down the drain.”

The future for GMG’s regional newspapers – principally the Manchester Evening News and Reading Evening Post – appears to be more pressing.

“The issue is a scale thing,” said McCall, frustrated that successful experiments such as the half paid-for, half free circulation of the Manchester Evening News cannot be rolled out to other regional titles because she doesn’t own any.

She confidently predicts: “Things are going to shift.”

Judging by McCall’s first 19 months in charge, that is a fair assessment.

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