In a bid to remake the country’s top-rated news program, Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, on Thursday unveiled an overhaul of “60 Minutes,” replacing the show’s executive producer with a tech journalist and firing two of its on-air correspondents.
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.
CBS News also fired Cecilia Vega, the program’s first Latina correspondent, and Sharyn Alfonsi, whose segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was pulled off the air abruptly last year by Ms. Weiss, who requested more reporting. It aired in full at a later date. Draggan Mihailovich, the executive editor of “60 Minutes,” was also fired, as was Matthew Polevoy, a senior producer.
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 “CBS Evening News,” hired new on-air contributors and personally booked some guests for interviews, a departure from the industry norm.
But the overhaul at “60 Minutes” is by far the largest gamble of Ms. Weiss’s 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.
Ms. Weiss’s handling of “60 Minutes” has led to internal turmoil. Her decision to hold Ms. Alfonsi’s segment set off a firestorm, though it eventually ran with additional comments from the Trump administration. This week, Ms. Alfonsi told The Times that CBS was no longer separating editorial independence from corporate interests.
Mr. Bilton, 49, will start his position with a staff already anxious about how the long-held traditions of “60 Minutes” 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 “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, referring to the program’s creator. “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 would be “quite frankly phenomenal.”
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.
“He has been consistently prescient about the ways that the technological revolution that we’re living through is upending the way that we consume storytelling and information,” Ms. Weiss said. “He has been the one to see the tsunami before the wave hits the rest of us.”
Mr. Bilton, who will relocate to New York from Los Angeles, is an unconventional choice for the “60 Minutes” job: All his predecessors have come from traditional broadcast news.
“When you take an insider and you put them inside a company, nothing changes,” Mr. Bilton said. “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 that I couldn’t be more excited to jump into. And I think you need that outside vision to be able to do that.”
He said it was too early to describe his plans for “60 Minutes” 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.
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 “Fake Famous,” an HBO film about aspiring social media influencers, and serving as a producer on “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” a film directed by Alex Gibney about the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Mr. Bilton is also set to publish a true-crime book about a Hawaiian crime syndicate with Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson. (He also wrote the screenplay for its film adaptation, to be directed by Martin Scorsese).
“60 Minutes” has been at the center of an ongoing drama about the future of CBS News.
President Trump sued CBS before the election in 2024 over an interview that the program conducted with Kamala Harris, who was running against him. The network’s owner, Paramount, eventually paid $16 million to settle the case, which many lawyers had deemed frivolous. Tensions within the network over how to respond to Mr. Trump also contributed to the resignation of a “60 Minutes” executive producer, Bill Owens, before Ms. Weiss joined.
For decades, “60 Minutes” has been something of an imperial institution within CBS News. Some of the show’s executive producers have had a direct line to the company’s chief executive, and its correspondents — who identify themselves by name at the top of the broadcast — operated out of offices separate from the rest of the network.
Ms. Simon, who had a year remaining on her contract at CBS, wrote in a farewell memo on Thursday that “60 Minutes” was “an institution built on independence, grit and rigorous search for the truth.”
Mr. Bilton, in the interview, said that he wanted “60 Minutes” to maintain its reputation for independence, while also collaborating with the rest of the news division.
“There’s incredible people at CBS News, and I think that it’s important for me to be able to tap into some of them at certain times, and vice versa,” Mr. Bilton said. “That doesn’t mean that it’s going to become one big organization. ‘60’ will still have its independence.”
