Top 10 Surprising 60 Minutes Facts You Didn’t Know!
Top 10 Surprising 60 Minutes Facts You Didn’t Know!
Since 1968, television’s most highly regarded news and information show, 60 Minutes, has provided in-depth coverage of important events, politicians, and celebrities through impeccable research, and insightful interviews. Here are just some of the stories about the creation, production, and impact of 60 Minutes.
Former newspaper editor Don Hewitt joined CBS’s news department in 1948, and by 1963, he’d become executive producer of The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. A couple of years later, he’d been relegated to making serious, long-form news documentaries.
At one point, he saw that the documentaries he produced pulled in about 10 percent of the TV audience and he started thinking about ways to double that number.
Hewitt described his thought process to the Television Academy…
“I came up with an idea: make the hour multi-subject to deal with people’s attention spans, package reality as attractively as Hollywood packages fiction.”
Hewitt further developed his concept with another inspiration in mind…
A mid-century publishing phenomenon, Life magazine used bold, striking, and large photographs to tell a mixture of stories that were both serious and light. Hewitt aimed to make a television version of Life, combining eye-catching visuals with compact, insightful storytelling.
60 Minutes, the first “newsmagazine” on TV, was born, presenting segments as chapters and using a magazine cover mockup as its logo. Keep watching to learn The Untold Truth Of 60 Minutes!