Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
CBS News chief Bari Weiss replaced 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon with former Times tech columnist Nick Bilton, citing the need for a new approach.
Bari Weiss has cleared the deck at 60 Minutes. The CBS News editor-in-chief replaced executive producer Tanya Simon on Thursday, naming former New York Times technology columnist and documentarian Nick Bilton as the show’s new leader.
The AP carried the staff memo. The wire’s first-take reporting on Weiss’s new-approach memo and the broader correspondent-level overhaul reports that Simon will leave after about a year as EP, capping 30 years at the Sunday newsmagazine.
The memo set the tone. Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski wrote that the goal was “building a show that thrives in the 21st century,” which would require “expanding 60 Minutes beyond a one-hour television broadcast.”
The framing for Bilton was about energy. The new EP, Weiss and Cibrowski wrote, “embodies the energy and ambition that animated the founders of the show. We cannot imagine a better fit.”
Bilton’s own memo to staff was longer. The new executive producer, who comes in without traditional broadcast experience, called 60 Minutes “the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced” and made the case for adapting to where audiences now consume news.
The correspondent shakeup is the louder change. The Boston Herald’s syndication of the AP report including the firings of correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega notes that Sharyn Alfonsi, whose segment about Trump administration deportees in a Salvadoran prison was pulled by Weiss in December and aired a month later, was let go alongside Cecilia Vega.
The Salvadoran prison segment is at the heart of the story. Alfonsi privately complained at the time that the spike was political, with the eventual airing including additional administration comments but no on-camera interview with officials.
The pattern around Weiss has critics watching. Since the Free Press founder was hired in October by Paramount Global‘s new management, Trump administration officials have been more visible on CBS News, in interviews she has sometimes personally helped arrange.
The president himself sat with Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes on November 2. The booking ran less than a year after Paramount settled out of court with Trump over the 2024 Kamala Harris interview that had become the basis for his lawsuit against the show.
The exits before Thursday were already adding up. Anderson Cooper exited the show in February, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family, though the timing raised questions about Weiss’s broader direction.
Bilton’s resume sits outside the Sunday-newsmagazine tradition. WPRI’s pickup of the AP item highlighting Bilton’s lack of traditional broadcast experience and his New York Times tenure notes that the new EP built his name as a technology columnist at the Times and has been working in long-form documentary in the years since, with no prior network-newsmagazine job on the record.
The show’s institutional identity is part of the bet. 60 Minutes premiered in 1968 and runs on the rhythm of its ticking stopwatch, a format that has barely changed in nearly six decades and that now sits squarely inside Weiss’s “new approach” framing.
What changes beyond the broadcast hour is the open question. Weiss and Cibrowski’s memo references a 60 Minutes that lives across CBS News rather than only on Sundays, with Bilton brought in to figure out what that actually looks like.
The ticking stopwatch still ticks. Whether it does so the same way after this fall is now in the hands of a tech journalist who has never run a Sunday-night TV broadcast.
