- CBS News is overhauling “60 Minutes” with a new executive producer who lacks traditional TV news experience.
- Editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and new executive producer Nick Bilton say the show must disrupt itself or risk being disrupted.
- “The show itself is not going to change,” Bilton told CNN. However, he and Weiss plan to reinvent the newsmagazine’s digital presence.
AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for free here.
CBS News is taking a huge risk by overhauling “60 Minutes.” Why blow up a profitable, prestigious newsmagazine when there is so much else at CBS that needs fixing?
Bari Weiss and her surprising pick for “60 Minutes” executive producer, Nick Bilton, have multiple answers to that question.
The short version, expressed by seven sources on condition of anonymity, and also relayed more diplomatically in Weiss and Bilton’s memos to staff, is that CBS management believes “60 Minutes” is an archaic institution that’s in urgent need of reinvention.
What “60 Minutes” defenders see as its strengths, they see as potential shortcomings, and they’re determined to rebuild the newsmagazine for a digital and vertical video age.
In her first six months as CBS News editor-in-chief, the sources said, Weiss perceived “60 Minutes” as calcified and resistant to change. When the old guard touted the newsmagazine’s stellar ratings, she said that success was all the more reason to change now, from a position of strength.
In meetings with staffers on Thursday, Weiss and Bilton invoked the technology industry truism that “If you don’t disrupt yourself, you will get disrupted.”
CBS veterans are definitely feeling disrupted. “We know this may not land with certain audiences,” a CBS News executive told me, admitting that some staffers (and maybe some “60” viewers) will be unsettled by the changes.
But “at the end of the day, the journalism will speak for itself,” Bilton told me in a phone interview, shortly after Weiss introduced him at the network’s Friday morning editorial meeting.
Bilton’s appointment was announced on Thursday via a New York Times story, minutes after news leaked that the executive producer for the past year, Tanya Simon, had been let go. “Leadership has decided it is time for a new chapter,” Simon wrote in her exit memo.
Two “60” correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, were also terminated. Add Anderson Cooper’s recent departure, and that’s three of the show’s seven full-time correspondents gone — meaning Bilton, Weiss, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski will immediately be in rebuilding mode.
Frankly, that’s where they want to be. When she arrived at CBS last October, Weiss was surprised by the place’s ancient qualities. (CBS News HQ did not have a dedicated podcast studio, for example.)
Weiss was put off by some of the organization’s ingrained habits and legacy attitudes, just as her lack of newsroom expertise and TV experience put off some CBS veterans.
She resolved to really, truly overhaul the news operation — asserting that the old ways hadn’t worked, since newscasts like the “CBS Evening News” have been stuck in third place in the ratings and outfits like CBS have not built big new digital businesses to replace what’s slowly but surely evaporating.
Weiss also sensed that a proverbial “deep state” at CBS would reject her ideas and try to wait her out, knowing that the news division has cycled through news bosses many times.
So it makes perfect sense, from her point of view, to hire outsiders, even or especially those without traditional TV news experience.
“When people say about Nick, ‘he hasn’t worked in network news for 20 years’ — yes, exactly, that’s the whole point!” a CBS source exclaimed to me last night.
Of course, the new era at CBS News has been picked apart, especially given parent company Paramount’s attempts to cozy up to President Trump and its pending acquisition of CNN and the rest of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Early missteps and malfunctions have heightened industry speculation that Weiss, too, won’t last. But the Bilton appointment may be the ultimate expression of both her outsider vision and Paramount CEO David Ellison’s support for it. Ellison, I’m told, had a long meeting with Bilton during the hiring process.
“David understands that broadcast is an iceberg that’s melting,” another CBS source remarked.
Yes, but some rank-and-file staffers fear that management’s changes are like hot air, speeding up the melting process.
Full disclosure: I have known Bilton for nearly 20 years. We worked together at The New York Times and we taped a couple of podcast episodes together at Vanity Fair.
So I can easily see why Bilton and Weiss hit it off. Bilton is an ideas guy, “a million ideas a minute,” as one confidant said. With his tech reporting background, he is fluent in the AI revolution and fearless about predicting the future. (He once wrote a book titled “I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works.”) And with his credentials as an author and filmmaker, he can confidently sketch out a vision for the future of media.
His memo to CBS did that. I posted the full text of the memo on X.
“Evolving or dying isn’t a threat. It’s simple math,” Bilton wrote. “My responsibility is not just technological transformation. It is also our trust with the public,” he added.
At Friday morning’s 9 a.m. meeting, Weiss called Bilton “unbelievably ambitious, entrepreneurial, collaborative” and an “idea generation machine.”
Many staffers are skeptical that he’ll have the right ideas. But a Weiss ally told me that Bilton, along with others, is part of a larger “transformation.”
“We need people with great story sense, great vision, and who are not forged into one very narrow way of storytelling,” they said. Ultimately, “linear is just another format,” and what CBS really needs are “the internal capabilities to make modern digital video.”
That same wrenching transition is happening all across the news industry.
As CNBC’s Alex Sherman wrote, “One of Bilton’s biggest initial challenges will be winning over CBS News employees who believe many of the changes being implemented in the newsroom are politically motivated.”
Hours after being fired with nearly a year left on her contract, Vega said that the editorial independence of “60 Minutes” is being threatened from the inside.
“In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” she said in a statement. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”
A CBS News spokesperson responded, “We respect Ms. Vega and her contributions, but her claims are not based in reality.”
Former correspondent Steve Kroft and former executive producer Bill Owens also spoke out Thursday, with Owens telling Status, “They’re killing 60 Minutes.”
At the same time, many staffers at CBS (and The Free Press) welcomed Bilton, with some posting cheerful messages on social media, sensing that real digital expansion of the “60 Minutes” brand is now possible.
But the Trump-era tension is real. Trump watches “60 Minutes.” He covets “60 Minutes.” He posts screeds about “60 Minutes.” He sued over “60 Minutes.”
This morning, I asked Bilton directly, “Will you shy away from aggressive coverage of the Trump administration?”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “If you look at Season 58 of ’60 Minutes,’ the team produced incredible coverage of the Trump administration, and that will continue in Season 59, Season 60 and so on.”
Some of Bilton’s Thursday afternoon comments to Semafor and New York magazine worried — and even offended — both CBS staffers and other industry insiders. He told New York magazine, of his lack of TV experience, “Do I need to know which button to press to make sure the show goes on air on a Sunday night? No.”
That quote displayed “blind arrogance,” Susie Banikarim of Columbia Journalism Review tweeted.
Bilton went on to say, “If there are questions I don’t have the answers to, there is a building full of people who can answer them.” And that was obviously his broader point.
But TV news is a lot harder than it looks. While Bilton does have experience making projects for Netflix and HBO, the learning curve will be steep.
Bilton’s stronger quote was to The Times: “When you take an insider and you put them inside a company, nothing changes. I’m not saying that we’re going to change the show completely and drastically. I’m saying that there are all these approaches and ideas that we can do… And I think you need that outside vision to be able to do that.”
Of course, embracing outsider thinking without alienating the insiders who get shows on the air is a tightrope walk.
I asked Bilton about his overarching “60 Minutes” message. His answer: “The show itself is not going to change. It is going to remain three incredible short-form documentaries, essentially, which is what it was founded on with Don Hewitt. The core of ’60’ will remain ‘60.’”
But beyond the Sunday night broadcast, “we’ll be reaching audiences in places that they need to be reached,” he said.
The show has sought to expand its online presence before. (The show once had a deal with Quibi!) But the newsmagazine’s current social and digital strategy feels stale and way too horizontal to Weiss and her inner circle.
So as “60 Minutes” looks to add new digitally native correspondents and land big scoops, it will also launch new iterations of the franchise in new places.
A year from now, given Paramount’s pending deal to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, “60 Minutes” might show up on CNN, too.
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