Yahoo CEO eyes Twitter exec. for 'media role': report

Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer is trying to hire a high-level Twitter executive to help turn the company back on the product side of things, a report suggests.

The report, from AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, says Katie Jacobs Stanton, Twitter's head of international markets, has been eyed to take on a role at Yahoo that would help spin the company back onto a media focus, citing people close to the situation.

Stanton was one of the driving forces to Google Finance, the search engine's financial news and ticker service, who went on to create Yahoo Finance -- one of the most popular products in the Yahoo online portfolio -- between April 1999 and October 2002. 

As AllThingsD explained: "She knows media," and that's exactly what Yahoo is: a media company.

But that may be about to change. While Mayer remains in her honeymoon period before she takes maternity later this year to have her first child, it's likely she will start replacing the top spots within Yahoo to create Google 2.0, or C- or VP-level leadership based on her own pickings.

This week, Mayer shifted the company's ethos towards 'products, not profit,' according to a Wall Street Journal report. Mayer recently removed the ticker from the company's internal website, dubbed Backyard, in a bid to shift her employees' focus on the products they are working on, rather than the company's finances.

(The finances, by the way, aren't looking too bad. The technology giant turned media company cleared the low bar set by Wall Street while disgraced former chief executive Scott Thompson was still in the boss' chair.)

What goes on next will be interesting. Yahoo continues to stumble around in its bid to work out exactly what it wants to be. Under Thompson and interim-CEO Ross Levinsohn, it was clear that the "media company" route was it. That was clear with the Clear Channnel digital radio deal and the Spotify pact in June. Now Mayer is in the chief's chair, it could be that the firm is trying to take on Google at a low-level. 

Who Mayer will pick in the coming weeks and months will be interesting: Yahoo could become a smelting pot from Facebook, Google, and Twitter and others, in order to create a wealth of insider knowledge to build Yahoo back up from the ground-up. 

Both Yahoo and Twitter were unavailable for comment outside U.S. business hours.