Google’s UK ad sales director Matt Brittin ticks all the interview boxes in this Telegraph.co.uk profile - the biggest tick: his defence against those “Google is killing newspapers” allegations: “It is easy for people in traditional media to look at the internet and say, ‘Oh God, the internet is taking away our readers and advertisers’. But – and I want to be really clear about this – it is not Google (NSDQ: GOOG) that is taking advertisers away. It is consumers changing their behaviour.”

Brittin knows only too well - he joined in 2007 from Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI), the newspaper publisher facing some of the biggest advertising losses in the online age: “With the recession, the advertising market is collapsing. Everybody is looking at their marketing budgets and switching to more accountable media. (The recession) is different this time. We are a digital economy now. In the UK, 70 percent of households have the internet and they are turning to it to save them money.” That must stick in Trinity’s craw. But Google should heed its own warning - UK revenue fell 11.7 percent between September and December, albeit thanks to UK-US currency fluctuation.

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