NBC News on Monday named Deborah Turness, a British news executive, as its next president, ending a monthslong search to fill one of the most prestigious jobs in American television journalism.
Ms. Turness will be the first woman to run a network news division in the United States. She will succeed Steve Capus, who stepped down in February after nearly eight years at the helm.
In a statement, Ms. Turness called her appointment “the greatest imaginable honor.”
“I am hugely excited by the opportunities that lie ahead and look forward to working with the talented journalists and technicians who make it one of the great global news operations,” she said.
Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Turness declined an interview request. She was in London on Monday, convening a staff meeting for her longtime colleagues at ITV News, the operation she has overseen for nine years, to tell them of her move, which will take effect in August. She will meet the staff of NBC, a unit of Comcast, on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Ms. Turness will inherit a news division that is wounded, having forfeited the top spot in the morning television ratings race last year to its archrival, ABC News. NBC’s “Today,” by some measures the most profitable part of the news division, has yet to recover. Earlier this month, in another loss for NBC News, its parent network canceled “Rock Center with Brian Williams,” the two-year-old newsmagazine that had struggled to hold onto a time slot.
However, its flagship nightly newscast, anchored by Mr. Williams, remains in first place in the ratings, and its in-house production company, called Peacock Productions, continues to strike deals with cable channels that want its programming. NBC’s news reports reach tens of millions of viewers a day.
More broadly, Ms. Turness will face the same challenges as her counterparts at ABC and CBS, the other two networks with news divisions. As television viewers spend more time online, news producers have to move with them, lest they risk losing market share. NBC News took control of its main Web site, MSNBC.com, last summer, when it dissolved a joint venture with Microsoft at a cost of about $200 million to the network. It renamed the Web site NBCNews.com. Later this year, MSNBC.com will become a destination for MSNBC, the liberal-leaning cable channel that has been a profit center for NBC News.
Ms. Turness’s job will be smaller than her predecessor’s job. For example, she will not have oversight of MSNBC. That’s a result of a restructuring that began last summer, shortly after the “Today” show fell to second place after a 16-year winning streak. The NBC News president, Mr. Capus at the time, stopped reporting directly to NBCUniversal chief executive Steve Burke; instead, the news division became one unit within an umbrella group called the NBCUniversal News Group. Mr. Burke named Patricia Fili-Krushel the chair of the new group, which also included MSNBC and CNBC. Mr. Capus stepped down partly due to his dissatisfaction with this arrangement.
Some business functions of NBC News are now handled by the umbrella group. And MSNBC, whose president Phil Griffin previously reported to Mr. Capus, now reports to Ms. Fili-Krushel, and will continue to do so after Ms. Turness arrives. This change implies that Comcast is putting some distance between the traditionally nonpartisan NBC News and the more opinionated, controversial MSNBC.
But Ms. Turness, who will report to Ms. Fili-Krushel, will have oversight of all news-gathering and programming for NBC News. This is similar to her role at ITV News, where her title was editor, in charge of three daily news broadcasts and seven bureaus around the world.
Ms. Fili-Krushel declined an interview request on Monday. But in an internal memorandum, she said that at ITV News Ms. Turness “has earned a reputation for being a strong leader, innovator, and respected journalist, and I look forward to her joining NBC News.”
The decision to look outside NBC and outside the United States for a president suggests a yearning for new thinking on the part of NBCUniversal executives. In her public statement about the appointment, Ms. Fili-Krushel mentioned Ms. Turness’s “proven track record for innovation and collaboration.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/media/deborah-turness-named-president-of-nbc-news.html?partner=rss&emc=rss