In a podcast interview, Carolyn McCall said the purpose of the group's regional titles had been to act as a "safety net" for the loss-making Guardian - but claimed they had stopped fulfilling that role.

The group sold its regional subsidiary GMG Regional Media, which includes the Manchester Evening News, to Trinity Mirror for £7.4m cash and release from a £37.4m printing contract ewarlier this week.

In the podcast, Ms McCall admitted that severing the 142-year-old link with Manchester had been a difficult decision, but said the regional newspaper business now represented too much of a risk.

"You can look at the cash value and say it wasn't very much but the £70m revenue in that business was in decline. Regional newspapers have been at the very sharp end of disruption from digital and for us it was a very small scale business," she said.

"It had just four per cent of the regional news market and despite really historic connections what it was set up to do for the Guardian was to be a safety net and it stopped being a safety net some years ago."

Questioned about Trinity Mirror's reputation as heavy-cost cutters, she said it would have been no different had GMG remained in charge of the regional titles.

"Everyone at regionals knew that cost reduction programmes were not over so we would have had to have made more redundancies going forward because the business has fundamentally changed," she said.

Last year, GMG's regional division made a profit of £500,000, down from £14.3m in 2007-2008.

The national division, Guardian News and Media, had been losing around £30m a year until a programme of cost-cutting was introduced late last year which has since resulted in more than 100 redundancies.

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