Media Mogul Peter Chernin Primed to Join Twitter’s Board of Directors

Popular microblogging service Twitter is preparing to officially announce a high-profile addition to its small and tech-savvy board of directors. And this time, the rising star of Silicon Valley is going Hollywood.

AllThingD reported Thursday that the San Francisco-based service has all but finalized its decision to appoint media mogul Peter Chernin to its board of directors. The company has reportedly been searching for a new board member for some time, and AllThingsD noted that it was particularly interested in media executives like Chernin.

Previously, Chernin has held key positions at major media companies like News Corp. and helped start the popular video streaming service Hulu. Chernin also currently sits on the board of the online music-streaming service Pandora.

Chernin would also be a replacement for Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of the popular media-centric start-up Flipboard, who left in August.

The move toward a media-centric board illuminates some of Twitter’s possible directions for future growth as the service continues to amass users and become an increasingly integral part of news media and entertainment alike. Much like the current efforts to monetize Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) and the fall from grace its close partner Zynga (Nasdaq: ZNGA) has taken in recent months, investors have become wary of the hype generated around young and promising social media ventures with ambiguous plans to monetize their respective user bases. Focusing on actual media consumption, rather than some user content generation, may allow Twitter to bypass this concern entirely if and when the company plans to go public.

Since it was founded in 2006, Twitter has carved out a space for itself in new and old media alike, forcing network television and print publications to begin using its iconic hashtags and bird-shaped logo to increase their own audience participation through the site.

Twitter’s current board holds a number of entrenched Silicon Valley icons like the company’s current CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams. Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, Peter Currie of Currie Capital and former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt also hold seats.

The news also comes little more than a month after Jack Dorsey stepped down from an operational role at Twitter to focus on his new company Square.