Fox taps Wertheimer as head of digital

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News Corp.’s Fox Broadcasting has tapped Hollywood and Silicon Valley veteran David Wertheimer as its president of digital operations for the network.

Wertheimer will have oversight of Fox’s strategy with regard to digital media platforms. Television networks such as Fox are striving to find a balance between making more of their content available online while at the same time trying not to undercut their traditional over-the-air television business model.

‘We are taking significant steps forward in engaging Fox audiences across the digital and social realms and David is the ideal person to help us envision and realize the amazing potential that presents,’ said Kevin Reilly, Fox’s president of entertainment, to whom Wertheimer reports.

The post is a new one created specifically for Wertheimer. Bill Bradford, Fox’s senior vice president of digital, will now report to Wertheimer.

Wertheimer most recently was chief executive of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC, which serves as something of a digital think tank for the the media industry and is funded primarily by the major movie studios and the TV networks.

Prior to that, he was president of digital entertainment for Paramount Pictures. He also spent several years at NeXT, the computer company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in the mid-1980s.

-- Joe Flint