LOS ANGELES, CA – SEPTEMBER 29: Nick Bilton speaks EPIX “Berlin Station” LA premiere at Milk Studios on September 29, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Joshua Blanchard/Getty Images for EPIX)
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CBS News head Bari Weiss announced on Thursday that she is hiring tech writer & documentarian Nick Bilton as the new executive producer of the long-running CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes.
Bilton, who has no broadcast news experience, replaces Tanya Simon, who was appointed to the position last year after spending more than 30 years at the program.
In an interview with the New York Times, Bilton said that his experience in documentary film and TV was in keeping with the founding ethos of the program, which he called “the most important news brand in American life:”
“Look at Don Hewitt and how he came up with the idea for this,” Mr. Bilton said. “He loved documentaries, but he did not have the patience to watch two-hour long versions of them. So he came up with ‘60 Minutes,’ which was a series of short documentaries.”
Mr. Bilton said that the recent furor around “60 Minutes” was “just noise,” chalking it up to routine fallout spurred by disruption at a legacy business. He added that the “end result” of the change that the show must undergo would be “quite frankly phenomenal.”
Both Bilton and Weiss have yet to provide any sense of what changes might be in store for 60 Minutes, which is the most-watched newsmagazine on television.
But Weiss has already made a number of changes behind the scenes, including holding the premiere of a segment detailing abuses at a notorious prison in El Salvador because she was unhappy with the reporting. It eventually ran with additional comments from the Trump administration added as a counterpoint.
She has also booked interviews directly for the show, something that in the past had been done exclusively by the show’s executive producer and individual correspondents.
There have also been a number of clashes this year with the show’s roster of longtime correspondents.
Weiss went around 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, who had been negotiating to interview Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Weiss booked Netanyahu directly, and reportedly assigned reporter Major Garrett to do the interview after the prime minister voiced his complaints about Stahl.
And Anderson Cooper recently exited the show, making it clear that he had lost faith in the current managing of the program:
“I hope 60 Minutes remains 60 Minutes. There’s very few things that have been around for as long as 60 Minutes has and maintain the quality that it has, and things can always evolve and change, and I think that’s awesome, and things should evolve and change, but I hope the core of what 60 Minutes is always remains.”
In an interview with the NY Times, Weiss said Bilton’s years of experience covering technology had given him experience on how to navigate industries that are undergoing profound disruption.
Weiss at hinted that she plans to bring new voices into the mix on 60 Minutes, and believes segments can be shorter in most cases. And according to sources at the show I have spoken with, she has mused about bringing back several memorable segments from the early years of the show, including the folksy think pieces done by the late Andy Rooney.
Behind the scenes of the show, staffers are suffering through what one source told me earlier this month as “existential dread” over the ongoing changes on the show:
“I just have this existential dread about what is in store for us. When you look at what Bari has done at the Evening News, it’s this scary combination of politics and incompetence. If the captain of the Titanic climbed into your rowboat and wanted to steer, you’d probably be wise to say ‘Maybe you should sit this one out’”
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