CBS names Nick Bilton as new executive producer of 60 Minutes

CBS News named Nick Bilton as the new executive producer of 60 Minutes, handing one of television’s most closely watched news jobs to a veteran reporter, author and filmmaker with a record of driving regulatory scrutiny. The move signals more than a personnel change. It is an attempt to modernize a broadcast institution while preserving the authority that made 60 Minutes a Sunday-night fixture for more than five decades.

Bilton, whom CBS described as an investigative journalist, best-selling author and filmmaker with more than two decades of journalism experience, previously covered how technology reshaped daily life at The New York Times and later contributed features and investigative work at Vanity Fair. CBS said his reporting helped trigger inquiries by the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and Congress. The network also pointed to his work on FAA electronics rules, which it said helped prompt the agency to overturn its ban on electronics during takeoff and landing, and to his investigation of Twitter’s deceptive user engagement metrics, which CBS said led to an $800 million class-action settlement.

The appointment comes after a turbulent stretch for the program. Tanya Simon became executive producer in July 2025, becoming the first woman to hold the role after serving as interim executive producer when Bill Owens stepped down in April 2025. Owens said he left because he lacked editorial independence, a critique that landed while Paramount was fighting Donald Trump over a CBS interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount later agreed to pay $16 million to settle that dispute.

Against that backdrop, CBS is framing Bilton’s arrival as a strategic expansion rather than a rupture. The company said the goal is to turn 60 Minutes into a "360-degree product" that reaches audiences across platforms while still serving the show’s traditional Sunday-night viewers. That language suggests a broader shift in how CBS sees legacy television news, less as a single broadcast than as a franchise that can move between linear TV, digital clips and other formats without losing its identity.

For 60 Minutes, the stakes are unusually high because the brand remains central to CBS’s news business. The program premiered on September 24, 1968, and CBS describes it as “America’s #1 television news program” and its most successful television broadcast in history. Bilton’s task is to protect that prestige while adapting a brand built for appointment viewing to an era in which news audiences are fragmented, skeptical and spread across screens.