CBS News Will Expand ‘60 Minutes’ to Audio, Free Streaming and Monday-Night Election Special
You’ll need more than an hour a week this season to really experience “60 Minutes.”
The venerable CBS newsmagazine, entering its 57th season, will move firmly beyond its Sunday-evening model with the launch of a free ad-supported streaming channel devoted to its library of investigations, features and profiles — including Andy Rooney’s essays and Mike Wallace’s reports. CBS News is also debuting “60 Minutes: A Second Look,” a 12-episode audio series hosted by CBS News correspondent Seth Doane that gives listeners access to a vault of stories, along with never-before-aired material and interviews with the producers and correspondents who reported and assembled the material. The streaming channel is available Thursday on Paramount+, Pluto and CBS News digital venues while the audio show begins September 17.
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There’s also a special edition of the program slated for Monday, October 7, that will offer new reporting on both the Republican and Democratic candidates. And the newsmagazine, which tested out 90-minute-long episodes last season, intends to bring them back again, with six such outings planned for the show between now and the end of 2024.
“I want ’60 Minutes’ to have as many eyeballs on it as possible in as many places as we can be,” says Bill Owens, executive producer of the newsmagazine, during an interview.
As producers work to expand distribution, they are also focused on the show’s famous storytelling. While many people probably used August to take a vacation, correspondent Cecilia Vega traveled to the South China Sea and managed to get herself and a “60 Minutes” crew entangled in a frightening international incident.
Vega says she was intent on examining “this conflict that the world isn’t talking about” in which Chinese ships are entering waters determined to belong to the Philippines and ramming other ships or using water cannons on them. In some cases, she says, there has been talk about hand-to-hand combat between Chinese crews and Filipinos.
“We wanted to go see for ourselves,” she says. Her team managed to get aboard a ship in hopes of witnessing Chinese aggression and was awakened by a shaking at 4 a.m. one early morning. “It was kind of terrifying,” she recounts. “The Filipinos were running around frantically, racing between decks, getting helmets on. They told us we had to have our life jackets on.” The ship they were on had been rammed by a Chinese counterpart, and “we didn’t know how bad the damage was and there was a question as to whether the Chinese would try to board.” Because the Filipino crew was also recording the ship’s voyage, she says, “we were able to reconstitute what had happened pretty much down to the moment of impact.”
Keeping the show’s signature stopwatch ticking in the streaming era means keeping an eye on both the content of the program and on ways to get it viewed. “How are we expanding the universe of ’60 Minutes’ to meet the audience’s expectations” asks Wendy McMahon, president and CEO of CBS news, stations and syndication businesses, in an interview. In some cases, she says, expanding the number of ways the show can be experienced can “surprise and delight” viewers, and “that drives fandom, if you will. It also drives revenue.”
These aren’t the first expansions of the series. In recent years, “60 Minutes” has established a perch on YouTube, and experimented with an extension on Quibi, the short-form video service launched by Jeffrey Katzenberg, that featured an entirely new team of correspondents.
Each new stretch of “60 Minutes” means tailoring the show for the new way in which it is being consumed. When “60” becomes “90,” says Owens, producers treat the extra half-hour as a venue to tell “layered” stories about a subject over two 11-minute segments. The FAST channel will largely mine the “60 Minutes” archives, he says, but there “will be weeks when current ’60 Minutes’ material will be made available.” The audio show will tap the expertise of veteran producers and correspondents, including Lesley Stahl and her longtime producer Shari Finkelstein, who can add behind-the-scenes color to stories they worked on in the past.
A top “60 Minutes” producer, Nicole Young, has been assigned to oversee special projects. Young has worked with correspondent Scott Pelley for 20 years and intends to continue to produce stories with him.
All of these new projects add new duties to the “60” staff, including Owens, who is also involved in overseeing a new edition of “CBS Evening News” slated to debut after the 2024 election.
“There is more, but I’ve asked for more,” says Owens. “We all care about protecting the brand. That’s Job 1, 2 and 3. But getting it out there in front of as many people as possible is very close. That’s Job 1A.”
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