When Nick Bilton first met with Bari Weiss about the opportunity to take over 60 Minutes, the most watched and highest-profile TV newsmagazine in America, the former Vanity Fair and New York Times journalist had already put his reporting days behind him in favor of screenwriting.
“I didn’t really have a desire to come back to journalism, quite frankly,” Bilton tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I felt like the ability to tell stories onscreen was the future of my next era of storytelling.”
But the opportunity nagged at him.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I like, I was working on all these screenplays, and all I could think about was 60 Minutes,” he added, noting that he came up with a “vision” for the news brand.
On May 28, Weiss made her move, announcing a major overhaul of the venerable newsmagazine. Out was the show’s executive producer Tanya Simon, along with a few of her top deputies. Also shown the exit were correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.
Bilton was announced as the show’s new EP. Inside the halls of 60, the news “hit like a ton of bricks,” one insider recalls.
To be sure, the overhaul had been expected for months. Even Simon’s exit was not entirely a surprise. But when an expected hypothetical becomes a tangible reality, it still stings. And for some longtime veterans of the show, it felt like the end of an era.
Weiss, installed as editor in chief of CBS News last fall, and Bilton, share a desire to pry CBS away from its reliance on television, which remains the primary means of viewership and revenue.
Bilton, 49, was coy about many of his planned changes (he is planning to meet with staff at the show and reconvene in a month or so to lay out his full vision), but the core premise appears built around extending 60 Minutes to the places where consumers primarily get their news.
While viewers over 50 still turn on their TV sets, those under 50 largely do not.
Or as Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski explained it in a note to 60 Minutes staff outlining the changes: “The reality facing journalism in 2026 is not easy. Information is fragmented. Algorithms reward outrage. AI-generated misinformation is proliferating. Audiences are overwhelmed.”
“Once a week for one hour, one evening, you have this incredible show, which is usually three small, short documentaries, and to me it’s crazy that that’s where it ends,” Bilton says. “I think that there is an opportunity to bring it to so many different platforms and to bring it to so many different people via those platforms by expanding the way we tell stories, and it’s still 60 Minutes … linear television is very much the audience coming to find you, and I think that there’s an opportunity to go and find the audience in a multitude of different mediums.”
If you squint a bit you can see where he is going. 60 Minutes correspondents could lead short segments that run first on TikTok or YouTube or Reels, before finding their way to Pluto and Paramount+ and, yes, CBS.
As it happens, 60 Minutes has actually tried this once before: The program produced a show called 60 in 6 for the ill-fated Quibi service. After Quibi shuttered only six months in, the show rebranded as 60 Minutes+ and moved to Paramount+.
CBS executives are said to have been pleased with that show, which had its own slate of correspondents and covered issues that were seen as more relevant to younger consumers. Ultimately, however, it was not renewed (though one source says it was extremely close to being picked up for a second season, and they were “stunned” when it wasn’t).
One high-level streaming executive explains it bluntly: News programs don’t drive serious viewership or engagement in subscription streaming. However, every once in a while, a segment or show can drive the conversation forward.
In addition, the setup CBS had with totally separate correspondents on the streaming and TV shows didn’t make sense any more than a magazine or newspaper having separate “print” reporters and “digital” reporters.
That is all but certain to be a mistake Bilton does not make. When the show returns, likely with a new slate of correspondents joining some of the existing members, expect those journalists to be leading viewers through the story on TikTok and YouTube as well as on CBS on Sunday nights.
Bilton suggests that the show could lean on correspondents who focus on beats, rather than generalists, though he stops short of naming names.
“Different correspondents that are specialists in different fields, and they are all going to be the best in their field, the best in the business, they are incredible storytellers, incredible investigators, fearless,” he says, when asked what he is looking for in a correspondent.
But Bilton will first need to gain trust among the staff and correspondents that remain and the newsmagazine’s longtime viewers, and do so under a backdrop clouded by politics. 60 Minutes, after all, was the source of President Trump’s lawsuit, settled months before David Ellison sealed his deal to acquire CBS’ parent company Paramount.
Vega released a fiery statement Thursday claiming that “in recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions,” she said. “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 said that “we respect Ms. Vega and her contributions, but her claims are not based in reality.”
Anderson Cooper made the decision to leave the show earlier this year, which means that with Vega’s and Alfonsi’s departures, the show is three correspondents down. Internally, some expect others to follow.
Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton are overhauling 60 Minutes team of correspondents, which included Sharyn Alfonsi, L. Jon Wertheim, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega and Anderson Cooper last season. Alfonsi, Vega and Cooper have exited.
Lesley Stahl is 84 and working on one-year contracts. Bill Whitaker is 74. Scott Pelley is 68, while Jon Wertheim is a relatively youthful 55.
In her note, Vega suggested that some of the correspondents that remain have pushed back on corporate leadership.
“I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity,” she said. “I am far from the only 60 Minutes correspondent who has asked herself, ‘What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?’”
It is not immediately clear if the wholesale changes made by Weiss will trip that red line among any of the four correspondents that remain.
The fear among some is that 60 Minutes is being declawed, its potency reduced, in the name of political expedience. Paramount, after all, is trying to secure final approvals for a $111 billion megadeal that would merge it with Warner Bros. Discovery … and make CNN and CBS News corporate siblings.
“The wall between editorial independence and corporate interest at CBS is being methodically torn down,” Alfonsi said in a statement after her contract was not renewed. “Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not. If this continues, the result will be a broadcast that looks like 60 Minutes but lacks the courage and character to produce journalism that matters.”
Bilton, for what it’s worth, says that “holding people to account” and “investigative journalism” remain core principles of the show, though he and Weiss will need to show, not tell, in order to pull off the changes they hope to make.
He also says that he wants to bring in “some of that kind of gonzo journalism stuff that I’ve done,” to make the show more modern.
One can look to his 2021 HBO documentary Fake Famous as a possible template, where he took three random Angelenos with modest social media followings and tried to turn them into social media influencers by buying followers and clout.
Or perhaps his series of reports about using mobile phones on airplanes, which ultimately led to the FAA changing its rules around the practice.
“I think there are a lot of parts of 60 that are fantastic and work really well, and I think there are other parts of it that can be brought into the modern era,” Bilton says. “This show is still the show, and the tick is still the tick, and the name is still the name, and the correspondents are still the guides, but it has reinvented itself over the years.”
Now it will be facing arguably its biggest reinvention yet, with a pair of TV novices at the helm. Stay tuned.
60 Minutes nets 6 million viewers every week, and often more than 10 million viewers during the NFL season, when it benefits from that lead-in.