“My job is going to be rethinking how we tell stories in a completely new way,” Nick Bilton, who was tapped to be the new executive producer of60 Minuteson Thursday,told me in a brief phone call this afternoon. “There’s enough people inside60 Minutesthat know which buttons to press to make sure it goes on air on a Sunday night.”

I asked Bilton, a former star New York Times reporter and successful documentary producer, whether he was daunted by the notion of entering television news for the first time as the leader of the industry’s most popular show.

“It’s not the slightest bit intimidating,” he said with conviction.

Bilton’s hire, on the heels of the firing of the show’s veteran senior executive producers, signals that Paramount CEO David Ellison and editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’ overhaul of CBS News will be radical and total, and that the newly minted mogul is willing to bear years of audience decline in the service of a new vision of a video news network that serves America’s broad, elusive middle.

Asked in an interview with Semafor on Thursday whether he was nervous about his lack of traditional TV experience, Bilton said that he knows enough about the format of the show to do it justice. The original idea behind60 Minutes, he said, was to create a series of short documentaries, and he’s produced documentaries in recent years for HBO and Netflix on topics from cryptocurrency to social media.

“When Don Hewitt started60 Minutes, his entire thesis was, ‘I want to make short-form documentaries because I don’t have the patience to watch hour-long, two-hour-long versions of it,” Bilton said. “I’ve honestly spent two-and-a-half decades becoming obsessed with storytelling, in all different formats, whether it’s books or the web or magazines or docs or film or TV.”

While he wasn’t planning on returning to journalism (Bilton’s upcoming book,The Company, co-authored with Dwayne Johnson, is slated to become a movie directed by Martin Scorsese), Bilton said Weiss approached him in recent months about taking over the show, and he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. In their conversations about the potential role, he and Weiss agreed that the program needed to expand its scope to cover new types of stories and have a larger digital presence.

Bilton told Semafor the program is an “incredible institution that is largely underutilized,” saying he planned to expand the franchise beyond its one-hour timeslot on Sundays. He envisions a more always-on operation that will publish more investigations and correspondent-driven content online.

“It’s the same as The New York Times publishing in print once a day, or Vanity Fair being a magazine that only goes out once a week or the New Yorker, or whatever. If you look historically to what happens to these institutions, why they fail — it’s because they don’t innovate and they don’t disrupt themselves,” he said. “I think that’s where we are with broadcast television. To me, that’s the most incredible exciting opportunity — to expand it beyond just one hour a week.”

In a note to staff on Thursday, Weiss said the changes in leadership represented the network’s desire to shake up60 Minutes.

Source: Drudge Report