Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, signaled a new direction for the nation’s top news program on Thursday, replacing the executive producer of “60 Minutes” with Nick Bilton, a longtime tech journalist and documentarian who has never worked in traditional broadcast news.
Mr. Bilton, 49, is a former New York Times technology columnist and a filmmaker who has directed and produced documentaries on business and technology for HBO and Netflix. He is only the fifth executive producer of the program, which was started nearly 60 years ago by the legendary producer Don Hewitt.
He is replacing Tanya Simon, who was appointed last year after spending more than 30 years at the program.
The choice of Mr. Bilton is one of the biggest moves yet from Ms. Weiss, who has made big changes at the news division 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 big guests for interviews, a departure from the industry norm.
Mr. Bilton’s appointment is by far the biggest gamble of Ms. Weiss’s tenure. “60 Minutes,” which remains appointment viewing for millions every Sunday night, is the top rated weekly newsmagazine show on television, 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. Last year, she held a story on a Salvadoran prison for further reporting shortly before it was set to air. It eventually ran with additional comments from the Trump administration appended. This week, the correspondent who reported the segment, Sharyn Alfonsi, told The Times that CBS was no longer separating editorial independence from corporate interests.
Mr. 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.”
Ms. Weiss said that she was drawn to Mr. Bilton because of his experience telling stories on multiple platforms, including in print, behind the camera and in best-selling nonfiction books. She said that years of experience covering 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.”
Though Mr. Bilton is an unconventional choice for the “60 Minutes” job — all of his predecessors have come from traditional broadcast news — Mr. Bilton said that, in his experience covering technology, it sometimes takes someone from outside an organization to change things for the better.
Mr. Bilton, who lives in Los Angeles, is relocating to New York. He said it was too early to describe his plans for “60 Minutes” in detail, but added that he would put an emphasis on telling stories beyond the weekly show and experimenting with new voices from outside 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.”
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, where he covered technology, politics and culture.
Since then, he has worked in documentary film, writing, directing and producing “Fake Famous,” an HBO documentary about aspiring social media influencers; and working 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 has also written books and is 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, operating with a high degree of independence. 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 — were venerated globetrotters who operated out of separate offices.
Mr. Bilton said that he wanted “60 Minutes” to maintain its reputation for independence and also collaborate 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.”
Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
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