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Bill Whitaker is 74, and Jon Wortheim is 55--but he is on mostly on part-time since he covers sports.
Going forward, this is what Matt Belloni of Puck said in his private email newsletter on Friday--and I agree with many of the things noted in this part of the article:
"...broadcast ratings have been holding okay lately as cable audiences plummet. But the stark reality of 60 Minutes has always been that its much-celebrated dominance—9.1 million same-day viewers on CBS this season, up 9 percent year over year!—has been dependent on its sports lead-ins, particularly the NFL. In February, once football ends and before March Madness or the Masters in April, 60 Minutes now often falls into the 5 million to 6 million viewer range—still the leader among newsmagazines but not that much ahead of Dateline on NBC or 20/20 on ABC. And minimal supplementary audience on Paramount+. So, is it the time slot or the show that should be celebrated?
That’s important not just because the patina of the largest audience in news has allowed 60 Minutes to air aggressive journalism. The other stark reality is that a big chunk of the program is devoted to so-called “rollout” pieces: participation profiles timed to a new product (remember the 2001 unveiling of the Segway?), a popular sporting event (the famous 1999 profile of women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt), or a new entertainment release (Chris Nolan’s recent sit-down plugging The Odyssey). 60 Minutes is considered the top U.S. booking because it’s got that huge audience, and it’s prestigious. If the linear numbers soon decline without a boost from streaming, a big chunk of the value proposition goes away, and so might those big gets.
Which would explain, at least in theory, the attempt to reinvent for streaming now. I’m told by one agent that (Bari) Weiss and (Nick) Bilton have been casting a wide net in seeking correspondents and producers. Either by choice or necessity, the pitch is that Bilton wants fewer “generalists” and more domain experts to add authenticity and authority to the show. Think a National Geographic editor handling nature or wildlife pieces, or an established British journalist covering stories based in Europe, plus additional contributions posting online with a more frequent cadence. Maybe that would work—as a viewer, I sometimes chuckle at the expertise imbalance when Stahl sits down with someone like Mark Zuckerberg—but with exceptions, that’s not the 60 Minutes model, where Stahl interviewing Zuckerberg is the point. We want to see it because it’s her; we regular people know and trust the correspondents to guide us through the confusing world.
Still… beyond the pure ratings issue, the prestige is obviously what’s most at stake here. A likely scenario now is 60 Minutes returns this fall, the product is slightly less good without its star correspondents and producers, and the ratings—thanks to that time slot—will be fine. But the noise around the show won’t go away. The think pieces, the disgruntled staffers leaking or speaking out, the discourse. It will lose some of that prestige. And maybe 60 Minutes doesn’t get Chris Nolan next time, or whomever—name your big get that isn’t Donald Trump. Maybe they become Dateline, a diminished news brand that nonetheless does big numbers on YouTube and boasts a popular podcast. That may ultimately be what the Ellisons want, but it still seems a lot less valuable than 60 Minutes."
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