By JOCELYN NOVECK, AP National Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Saying it was time for a new approach and a new chapter, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss has replaced the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” naming outsider Nick Bilton, a longtime technology journalist and documentarian, as the show’s new leader.
Executive producer Tanya Simon will be leaving about a year after being named to the job following 30 years at the venerable Sunday evening program.
In a memo to staff Thursday, Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski said their goal was “building a show that thrives in the 21st century.”
“That requires a new approach,” Weiss and Cibrowski wrote, defining it as “expanding ‘60 Minutes’ beyond a one-hour television broadcast, deepening its role across CBS News, and holding everything we produce to the ambition, fairness, and fearlessness that have defined ‘60 Minutes’ at its best.”
Bilton, they said, “embodies the energy and ambition that animated the founders of the show. We cannot imagine a better fit.” Bilton is also a former New York Times technology columnist.
Also let go, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on anonymity: correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi, whose segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was temporarily pulled by Weiss, running a month later; and Cecilia Vega.
Sweeping actions like those announced Thursday had been widely expected from Weiss, founder of the Free Press website. Since she was hired in October by Paramount’s new management, she has fast become a headline-maker and polarizing figure in journalism.
In his own lengthy memo to staff, Bilton, who comes to his new post without traditional broadcast experience, said “60 Minutes” was “without exaggeration, the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced.”
“The fact that this show has remained a fixed point in a culture is part of why this show still matters as much as it does,” he wrote. “I don’t want to lose that. But the world we are reporting on, and the world we are reporting to, where people consume their news, has moved. And if we don’t move with it, in the ways that matter, we won’t be here for the next sixty years. I want to do everything humanly possible to ensure that we are.”