CBS News Will Expand ’60 Minutes’ to Audio, Free Streaming and Monday-Night Election Special

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor You’ll need more than an hour a week this season to really experience “60 Minutes.” The venerable CBS newsmagazine, entering its 57th season, will move firmly beyond its Sunday-evening model with the launch of a free ad-supported streaming channel devoted to its library of investigations, features and profiles — including Andy Rooney’s essays and Mike Wallace’s reports. CBS News is also debuting “60 Minutes: A Second Look,” a 12-episode audio series hosted by CBS News correspondent Seth Doane that gives listeners access to a vault of stories, along with never-before-aired material and interviews with the producers and correspondents who reported and assembled the material. The streaming channel is available Thursday on Paramount+, Pluto and CBS News digital venues while the audio show begins September 17.

There’s also a special edition of the program slated for Monday, October 7, that will offer new reporting on both the Republican and Democratic candidates. And the newsmagazine, which tested out 90-minute-long episodes last season, intends to bring them back again, with six such outings planned for the show between now and the end of 2024. “I want ’60 Minutes’ to have as many eyeballs on it as possible in as many places as we can be,” says Bill Owens, executive producer of the newsmagazine, during an interview.

As producers work to expand distribution, they are also focused on the show’s famous storytelling. While many people probably used August to take a vacation, correspondent Cecilia Vega traveled to the South China Sea and managed to get herself and a “60 Minutes” crew entangled in a frightening international incident. Vega says she was intent on examining “this conflict that the world isn’t talking about” in which Chinese ships are entering waters determined to belong to the Philippines and ramming other ships or using water cannons on them.

In some cases, she says, there has been talk about hand-to-hand combat between Chinese crews and Filipinos. “We wanted to go see for ourselves,” she says. Her team managed to get aboard a ship in hopes of witnessing Chinese aggression and was awakened by a shaking at 4 a.m.