In a bid to remake the country\u2019s top-rated news program, Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, on Thursday unveiled an overhaul of \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d replacing the show\u2019s executive producer with a tech journalist and firing two of its on-air correspondents.<\/p>\n
Ms. Weiss named Nick Bilton, a former New York Times technology columnist and a filmmaker who has directed and produced documentaries for HBO and Netflix, as her pick to lead the 58-year-old Sunday show. Mr. Bilton, who has never worked in traditional broadcast news, will replace Tanya Simon, who had been at the show for more than three decades.<\/p>\n
CBS News also fired Cecilia Vega, the program\u2019s first Latina correspondent, and Sharyn Alfonsi, whose segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was pulled off the air<\/a> abruptly last year by Ms. Weiss, who requested more reporting. It aired in full at a later date. Draggan Mihailovich, the executive editor of \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d was also fired, as was Matthew Polevoy, a senior producer.<\/p>\n Ms. Weiss, an opinion journalist with no prior experience in television, has made major changes at CBS since being appointed last year by the tech scion David Ellison. She has named Tony Dokoupil to helm \u201cCBS Evening News,\u201d hired new on-air contributors and personally booked some guests for interviews, a departure from the industry norm.<\/p>\n But the overhaul at \u201c60 Minutes\u201d is by far the largest gamble of Ms. Weiss\u2019s tenure. The program remains appointment viewing for millions every Sunday night, and its viewership this season rose 9 percent from the year prior, according to Nielsen.<\/p>\n Ms. Weiss\u2019s handling of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d has led to internal turmoil. Her decision to hold Ms. Alfonsi\u2019s segment set off a firestorm, though it eventually ran with additional comments from the Trump administration. This week, Ms. Alfonsi told The Times<\/a> that CBS was no longer separating editorial independence from corporate interests.<\/p>\n Mr. Bilton, 49, will start his position with a staff already anxious about how the long-held traditions of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d might change. In a joint interview with Ms. Weiss on Thursday, he said that his experience in documentary film and TV was in keeping with the founding ethos of the program, which he called \u201cthe most important news brand in American life.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLook at Don Hewitt and how he came up with the idea for this,\u201d Mr. Bilton said, referring to the program\u2019s creator. \u201cHe loved documentaries, but he did not have the patience to watch two-hour-long versions of them. So he came up with \u201860 Minutes,\u2019 which was a series of short documentaries.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Bilton said that the recent furor around \u201c60 Minutes\u201d was \u201cjust noise,\u201d chalking it up to routine fallout spurred by disruption at a legacy business. He added that the \u201cend result\u201d of the change would be \u201cquite frankly phenomenal.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Weiss said that she was drawn to Mr. Bilton because of his career telling stories on multiple platforms, including in print, behind the camera and in nonfiction books. She said that his coverage of technology had given him experience on how to navigate industries like broadcast news that are undergoing profound disruption.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has been consistently prescient about the ways that the technological revolution that we\u2019re living through is upending the way that we consume storytelling and information,\u201d Ms. Weiss said. \u201cHe has been the one to see the tsunami before the wave hits the rest of us.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Bilton, who will relocate to New York from Los Angeles, is an unconventional choice for the \u201c60 Minutes\u201d job: All his predecessors have come from traditional broadcast news.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you take an insider and you put them inside a company, nothing changes,\u201d Mr. Bilton said. \u201cI\u2019m not saying that we\u2019re going to change the show completely and drastically. I\u2019m saying that there are all these approaches and ideas that we can do that I couldn\u2019t be more excited to jump into. And I think you need that outside vision to be able to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n He said it was too early to describe his plans for \u201c60 Minutes\u201d in detail, but added that he would place an emphasis on telling stories beyond the weekly show and experimenting with new voices from outside traditional broadcast news.<\/p>\n Mr. Bilton has had a varied career. After working as a designer at The Times, Mr. Bilton became a technology columnist for the newspaper in 2009, and left in 2016 to join Vanity Fair as a correspondent. Since then, he has worked in documentaries, writing and directing \u201cFake Famous,\u201d an HBO film about aspiring social media influencers, and serving as a producer on \u201cThe Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,\u201d a film directed by Alex Gibney about the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.<\/p>\n Mr. Bilton is also set to publish a true-crime book about a Hawaiian crime syndicate with Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson<\/a>. (He also wrote the screenplay for its film adaptation<\/a>, to be directed by Martin Scorsese.)<\/p>\n \u201c60 Minutes\u201d has been at the center of an ongoing drama about the future of CBS News.<\/p>\n