By David Bauder, Media Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --CBS News is launching a streaming version of "60 Minutes" on the new Paramount+ service, hoping to expose the durable brand to a younger and more diverse audience.
The "60 Minutes+" program will debut March 4 with three separate episodes, the network announced Wednesday.
The announcement was part of a rollout for Paramount+, which is replacing the "CBS All Access" service, offering Paramount movies as well as old and new programming from CBS and the Viacom stable of networks.
For "60 Minutes+," CBS is repurposing a team put together last year for a similar program, "60 in 6," on the ill-fated Quibi platform. That service for programming geared to mobile devices shut down after seven months last year.
The same four-person correspondent team that made nearly two dozen "60 in 6" episodes — Enrique Acevedo, Seth Doane, Wesley Lowery and Laurie Segall — will work on "60 Minutes+." Jonathan Blakely, who also worked on the Quibi show, will be executive producer.
While "60 in 6" had shorter stories than the TV version of "60 Minutes," the Paramount version will go longer. Each episode will consist of a single 20-minute story. To start, three separate episodes are dropping next week: Segall's interview with QAnon's Jacob Chansley, Acevedo's profile of reggaeton star J Balvin and Doane's story on the dangers of shrinking glaciers.
For CBS, it's the latest effort to extend the brand for one of television's oldest and most successful news programs. Sunday's episode of "60 Minutes" was the most-watched program on television last week.
Yet its audience is among the oldest in television, with a median age of over 65, the Nielsen company said. The stories and topics on the new streaming show will be geared to a younger, more diverse diverse audience.
Although there are no plans for the "Plus" stories to appear on TV, building a new team of correspondents and producers has benefits for the news division, said Bill Owens, executive producer of "60 Minutes."
"We want to grow the bench," said Owens, who got his start as a newsmagazine producer for CBS on the "60 Minutes II" television spinoff, which aired from 1999 to 2005.
J Balvin has a huge following, but to put that profile on the TV version of the show, Acevedo would probably have to spend considerable time explaining to viewers who the star is, Owens said.
Acevedo, who's worked at Univision, said he grew familiar with "60 Minutes" when his father watched reruns of the newsmagazine on a Mexican cable station. Acevedo said he wanted to become a journalist after watching Scott Pelley's reporting on the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.
"People always recognize the ticking clock," he said.
He's already at work on stories about Latin America and immigration. "60 Minutes" requires its correspondents to be generalists, but team members also bring a specific expertise, Blakely said.
Doane has been a foreign correspondent at CBS, Segall covered technology at CNN and Lowery won a Pulitzer Prize at The Washington Post for coverage of fatal police shootings.
Harvey Weinstein hit with new sex crime charge in New York
Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a new sex crime charge in New York, as he awaits retrial in his landmark #MeToo case.
Details of the new allegations were not immediately available. He was charged with committing a criminal sex act.
The jailed ex-movie mogul has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
Prosecutors revealed last week that Weinstein had been indicted on additional sex crime charges that weren't part of the case that led to his now-overturned 2020 conviction. But the new indictment was sealed until his arraignment.
Prosecutors have said that the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults โ two in hotels in the Tribeca neighborhood and one at a lower Manhattan residential building. The purported incidents took place from the mid-2000s to 2016, prosecutors said.
But it's not clear whether any of those allegations underlie the new indictment.
While bracing for the new charges, Weinstein also is awaiting retrial after New York state's highest court this spring overturned his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges involving two women. The high court, called the Court of Appeals, ordered a new trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin Nov. 12.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the then-trial judge unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations that were not part of the case. That judge's term expired in 2022, and he is no longer on the bench.
Prosecutors have said they'll seek to fold the new charges into the retrial, but Weinstein's lawyers say it should be a separate case.
Weinstein, who also was convicted in 2022 in a Los Angeles rape case, remains behind bars while awaiting his New York retrial.
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