The company, owned by Guardian Media Group and venture capitalist Apax Partners, revealed the creation of a new as-yet unnamed operating company that would combine Emap and 4C, formally retiring those brands, and “accelerate the conversion of former Emap products into pure digital and event businesses”. 

Other Top Right Group divisions Glenigan, Groundsure, De Havilland and Planet Retail/RNG are already 100% digital media and events businesses and will be integrated into the new company under Emap chief executive Natasha Christie-Miller.

She is credited with transforming Emap from a print-led publisher to a digitally led 'subscription content' and events business in which print now accounts for less than a third of subscription revenues. Emap posted 6% organic revenue growth in 2014 for the fourth year in a row under her leadership.

Top Right chief executive Duncan Painter said in a statement: “Customers are sending a clear message: digital subscriptions and live events are the formats they want to engage with. This change finalises our group’s migration to a digital and large-scale events company.”

He told The Guardian that 67% of Emap revenues are now from digital media and events.

"Over the next 12 to 18 months all of the titles will become digital-only."

Christie-Miller added: “Creating this new company is an opportunity to finalise the successful digital migration of our great brands, which started four years ago.”

All of Emap's titles are printed by Kent-based Headley Brothers, which in July spoke about a renewed confidence in a more prosperous future after restructuring its print wing.

It reversed an operating loss of £878,226 in its print business during 2013 to post an operating profit of £61,749 on yearly sales of £19.5m in the 12 months to 6 December 2014.

In its annual results statement the Headley Brothers board said it was optimistic about its future prospects. “The directors are confident that the continued recovery will be evident in the 2015-16 results, and that those results will demonstrate profits across the board,” it said.

The printer was not available for comment at the time of writing.

Ben Allen, chief executive of Mark Allen Group, which publishes PrintWeek, said he was not surprised at the move.

“A lot of the bigger publishers are going down that route, that’s where the investors see a return. The advantage with being a privately owned business is we’re able to take a bit of a longer-term view," he said.

“Print remains an important part of our business and it allows us to develop extensions around the brands.

“Print is like the shop window – you push your print out for people to read. But with online, you've got to pull people in. It’s much more difficult to identify the brand if you’ve got to pull them into it.

“My personal opinion is that people engage with print in a much better way than they do online.”

Media commentator and former Emap journalist Arif Durrani said the move to digital-only could be short-sighted.

"It tells you just how quickly the media space has evolved in the last decade when the imminent demise of the Emap brand barely raises an eyebrow. It’s such recent history yet all too easy to forget: less than 10 years ago Emap was the second biggest magazine publisher not just in the UK but France too.

"The move to digital-only is only surprising in its finality. From a revenue and operational perspective, the physical magazines will be no great loss. But to rule out the use of print altogether could be short-sighted.  

"Print, while not the consumer revenue generator it once was, continues to have an engagement with the reader that is hard to replicate elsewhere. Recognition about the power of print is what’s fuelling today’s burgeoning freemium and custom content sectors.

"I think Emap will miss the authority and easily identifiable communities its magazine brands provided." 

Emap was launched in 1947 as regional newspaper group the East Midland Allied Press, moving into magazines with the launch of Angling Times in 1953. Guardian Media Group and Apax paid £1.1bn for Emap eight years ago. 

In 2014 Top Right reported EBITDA profit of £85.3m on turnover of £312.7m.