In a move destined to raise eyebrows across UK online publishing (and beyond), Google’s VP, marketing for EMEA Lorraine Twohill has joined the board of Telegraph Media Group (TMG) as a non-executive director. Release. The publisher of The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and Telegraph.co.uk has brought Twohill on board to benefit from her five years’ experience at the search engine superpower, which she has spent expanding the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) brand in 20 countries. Twohill joined Google as director of product marketing in 2003 and before that was European heads of marketing for online travel firm Opodo from 2001.

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TMG has made big gains online in the past 12 months—according to ABCe data, it has gone from 9.7 million unique monthly users in August 2007 to 22 million in August this year. In common with all the main UK newspapers, it has massively grown its foreign audience: 72 percent of all its traffic in August came from overseas, most of that from the US. But it wasn’t that long ago that TMG editor-in-chief Will Lewis - speaking on behalf of the company’s CEO Murdoch McLennan - was complaining that newspapers’ “ability to protect content is under consistent attack from those such as Google and Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO) who wish to access it for free”. There clearly seems to have been a change of heart since then.