NBC Said to Settle on New Head of News Division

NBC News is on the verge of naming Deborah Turness, the head of Britain’s ITV News, as its next president, according to several people with knowledge of the appointment.

Ms. Turness, if appointed, will be the first woman president of a network television news division in the United States. She will succeed Steve Capus, who stepped down from the position in February after a tenure of nearly eight years.

A spokeswoman for NBC News, a unit of Comcast’s NBCUniversal, declined to comment. Ms. Turness also declined to comment. But others with knowledge of the appointment said that her promotion would be announced as early as Monday. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the appointment publicly.

Ms. Turness’s name first surfaced last month in a Los Angeles Times article that identified her as a candidate. Though she is not widely known in the television news industry in the United States, Ms. Turness has strong credentials; she has worked at ITN, one of the BBC’s main rivals in Britain, for 25 years, and has been the head of ITV News since 2004. Her current title there, editor, is analogous to the title of presidentat the American networks.

When asked about Ms. Turness’s departure, a spokeswoman for ITV News said, “We don’t comment on speculation.”

ITV and NBC News have had a content-sharing relationship for several years; NBC sometimes televises reports from ITV correspondents in Africa and the Middle East.

NBC News, founded in 1940, was the nation’s first producer of television news; it was joined later by ABC and CBS. The news division has had nine presidents in the 73 years since its founding.

Mr. Capus’s departure in February was spurred partly by his frustration with a new management structure set up by Stephen B. Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal. That structure, imposed last July, folded NBC News and two cable news channels, MSNBC and CNBC, into a new unit called the NBCUniversal News Group, led by one of Mr. Burke’s top lieutenants, Pat Fili-Krushel. Ms. Turness will report to Ms. Fili-Krushel, according to the people with knowledge of the appointment.