How I Brought More News Into the 60 Minutes Format

I didn't make 60 Minutes better than it had been. I made the broadcast more modern, with the most important change being to make it newsier. For many years, the prevailing belief had been that covering a current news event was not really what 60 Minutes was supposed to do. I disagreed. After I took charge, major news stories became an important part of the broadcast.

September 11th provides the clearest example. At 60 Minutes II, our sister broadcast, we dedicated every hour to the attacks and their aftermath for three and a half to four consecutive months—every hour. The original 60 Minutes devoted about a tenth as much time to the story. I believed then, and I still believe today, that an experienced team can produce a story in one week, or sometimes in only three days, that is every bit as strong as one developed over two months.

We could work that quickly because most of us had come through the CBS Evening News. We knew how to produce stories under intense time pressure without losing the details that made them matter. Steve Kroft had that background. I also brought Scott Pelley with me. I would rank him above nearly everyone I have ever worked with when it comes to taking a developing news event and turning it into a 60 Minutes story. That required finding one narrow and meaningful point of entry rather than attempting to review an entire subject. To me, that was the essential job. You did not try to cover everything. You found the story, focused it tightly, and told it well.

We also avoided placing too much importance on the correspondents who appeared on television. Don used to say it, and I continued saying it after him: we had about 75 reporters at 60 Minutes, and only five of them happened to be on camera.

I admit I worry about the direction of today's broadcast. It is now 59 seasons old. The people who followed me, including Bill Owens and Tanya Simon, did strong work by every account, yet they were let go anyway. I'm concerned the next person in charge may not understand the principles behind how we built the program. Those principles included choosing a narrow story instead of a broad subject and recognizing that trust develops over decades rather than appearing overnight. There is still tremendous talent in that building. My concern is whether its leader will know how to bring out that talent, just as others once brought it out of us, through the quiet and often unglamorous decisions involved in telling a story properly.

Perhaps the person leading it now will prove me wrong. I sincerely hope that happens. I still care deeply about the broadcast, even from a distance. It remains with me in much the same way I still remember the two weeks I spent in the Zimbabwe bush pursuing a story that had nothing to do with a newsroom.