Media

The ‘completely new’ ‘60 Minutes’

“My job is going to be rethinking how we tell stories in a completely new way,” Nick Bilton, who was tapped to be the new executive producer of 60 Minutes on Thursday, told me in a brief phone call this afternoon. “There’s enough people inside 60 Minutes that know which buttons to press to make sure it goes on-air on a Sunday night.”

I asked Bilton, a former star New York Times reporter and successful documentary producer, whether he was daunted by the notion of entering television news for the first time as the leader of the industry’s most popular show.

“It’s not the slightest bit intimidating,” he said with conviction.

Bilton’s hire, on the heels of the firing of the show’s veteran senior executive producers, signals that Paramount CEO David Ellison and editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’ overhaul of CBS News will be radical and total, and that the newly minted mogul is willing to bear years of audience decline in the service of a new vision of a video news network that serves America’s broad, elusive middle.

Asked in an interview with Semafor on Thursday whether he was nervous about his lack of traditional TV experience, Bilton said that he knows enough about the format of the show to do it justice. The original idea behind 60 Minutes, he said, was to create a series of short documentaries, and he’s produced documentaries in recent years for HBO and Netflix on topics from cryptocurrency to social media.

“When Don Hewitt started 60 Minutes, his entire thesis was, ’I want to make short-form documentaries because I don’t have the patience to watch hour-long, two-hour-long versions of it,” Bilton said. “I’ve honestly spent two-and-a-half decades becoming obsessed with storytelling, in all different formats, whether it’s books or the web or magazines or docs or film or TV.”

While he wasn’t planning on returning to journalism (Bilton’s upcoming book, The Company, co-authored with Dwayne Johnson, is slated to become a movie directed by Martin Scorsese), Bilton said Weiss approached him in recent months about taking over the show, and he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. In their conversations about the potential role, he and Weiss agreed that the program needed to expand its scope to cover new types of stories and have a larger digital presence.

Bilton told Semafor the program is an “incredible institution that is largely underutilized,” saying he planned to expand the franchise beyond its one-hour timeslot on Sundays. He envisions a more always-on operation that will publish more investigations and correspondent-driven content online.

“It’s the same as The New York Times publishing in print once a day, or Vanity Fair being a magazine that only goes out once a week or the New Yorker, or whatever. If you look historically to what happens to these institutions, why they fail — it’s because they don’t innovate and they don’t disrupt themselves,” he said. “I think that’s where we are with broadcast television. To me, that’s the most incredible exciting opportunity — to expand it beyond just one hour a week.”

In a note to staff on Thursday, Weiss said the changes in leadership represented the network’s desire to shake up 60 Minutes.

“The reality facing journalism in 2026 is not easy. Information is fragmented. Algorithms reward outrage. AI-generated misinformation is proliferating. Audiences are overwhelmed. And they have lost trust in legacy media,” she said. “That reality makes the mission of 60 Minutes more important than ever.”

The new 60 Minutes has buy-in from the top of the parent company as well. Bilton told Semafor he occasionally bumped into Ellison in Hollywood when he was shopping various documentary and scripted television projects. But he said he had gotten to know Ellison while discussing 60 Minutes’ future, and he believed that Ellison was a good steward to help CBS News and 60 Minutes transition from a primarily linear television setup to a digital-first operation.

“One thing about him that I really admire is, I think that tech companies, one of the things they do is they share their technologies between departments and between companies. You have Elon Musk who’s got his battery company that’s giving batteries to Tesla, AI is going from Tesla to SpaceX, and so on. Media companies don’t think like that. What David is doing is exactly that,” Bilton said of Ellison. “That is so exciting and innovative, and it’s the same thing that we want to do with 60 and CBS News and so on.”

Since Ellison bought Weiss’ Free Press and installed her as editor-in-chief of CBS News last October, the network has attempted to shift its ideological valence and reorient itself away from the linear product towards special event broadcasts and digital content.

Weiss has brought on more right-leaning voices and angered many liberals by putting the brakes on an investigation of a notorious Salvadoran prison, and for appearing too chummy with President Donald Trump (she was among those in attendance at Paramount’s tribute to the president and the First Amendment over White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend).

In day-to-day execution, the most notable change the Weiss-Ellison era has produced has been a general disregard for television experience as a necessary element of the network’s journalism. When Weiss joined, she had no experience producing TV, leading to some hiccups in early broadcasts. In addition to Bilton, Weiss has leaned largely on people from print media, bringing in Adam Rubenstein, a former New York Times and Free Press staffer who serves as the network’s deputy editor-in-chief, and managing editor Charles Forelle, a former editor at The Wall Street Journal.

Weiss and Bilton are right that audiences for legacy television are rapidly shrinking as more and more people turn to digital and streaming services for news and entertainment, and for major linear television franchises to survive, they need to evolve and figure out a way to stand out online.

But purposefully or not, CBS News’ changes in broadcast and political ideology have both cost them their remaining audience and alienated some remaining staff. One by one, many of the network’s most prominent on-air personalities have made their displeasure known, sinking morale among the rank-and-file and prompting leaks and internal frustration. Cecilia Vega, one of the correspondents fired on Thursday, had at times pushed back against Weiss, Semafor has learned, and was let go with years remaining on her contract. Vega did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move away from technical broadcast expertise has similarly strained the network. As I reported, the network fumbled new host Tony Dokoupil’s application for a visa to China during Trump’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, forcing the team to salvage the mission with a trip to Taiwan. For other logistical reasons, that didn’t go well either.

Viewers, too, have not stuck around to ride out the changes. The network’s evening news ratings have cratered, and the broadcast remains in a distant third place.

There’s broad uncertainty about how the remaining correspondents will respond to the latest fundamental changes at the show. Many staffers have wondered about the future at the network of longtime correspondents Scott Pelley, Bill Whitaker, and Lesley Stahl. While Pelley is currently on contract with the network, Stahl has been on one-year deals. While she indicated privately that she is likely to return next season, some at CBS News wondered if the upheaval will influence her decision. Stahl did not respond to a request for comment.