A first glimpse at the new ’60 Minutes’

By Brian Stelter, CNN

Good morning! This is one of my favorite days of the year — the unofficial start of fall, full of back-to-school and back-to-work energy. You can feel it in this morning’s announcements, book launches and trailers. Here’s the latest from MS NOW, “60 Minutes,” Alex Gibney, Poynter and more…

New ‘60 Minutes’ takes shape

The “60 Minutes” brand has suffered mightily in the past few months. Now CBS News is trying to repair the damage — and modernize the most-watched news program on US TV.

This morning CBS announced a big exclusive interview for Sunday’s season premiere; previewed some of the tweaks to the newsmagazine’s appearance; and released a group photo of the “new 60 Minutes team in Murrow’s old hangout.”

“This Sunday on @60Minutes: Dude 44 Bravo speaks for the first time,” Bari Weiss wrote on X, promoting Norah O’Donnell’s sit-down with the Air Force officer who was rescued after his plane was shot down over Iran.

Executive producer Nick Bilton also sat down with NYT’s Ben Mullin to preview his changes to the show. Read the full story here via this gift link.

Among the numerous “slight” changes that Bilton says “will make for a new approach to ‘60 Minutes’ in its totality,” he’s moving away from “walk and talk” camera shots, and he’s replacing “the giant ‘book’ graphics that appear behind correspondents before each new segment.”

What’s next: CBS will release a YouTube trailer for the new season, mixing clips of Mike Wallace and Matt Gutman, later today. And it will announce the third story for Sunday’s premiere later in the week.

Whitaker: ‘We shall see’

Bill Whitaker, one of the three correspondents who decided to stay after “Black Thursday,” told Mullin that he has spoken with Weiss about interference concerns.

“She said she didn’t see it as interference,” Whitaker said. “She thought she was being helpful. And if I don’t think she’s being helpful, and I see it as interference, that I should just call her on it. So we shall see.”

MS NOW rolls out membership model

“MS NOW will enter the direct-to-consumer era” tomorrow, “launching a membership plan and dedicated streaming service,” Deadline’s Dade Hayes writes.

MS NOW laid out the details in this press release a few minutes ago. Memberships will cost $7.99 a month or $79.99 a year. The service will feature live daily Q&As with hosts and reporters.

There will also be a partnership with Calm, the well-known mindfulness app. “Among those features will be meditation exercises created by Calm to help users process the day’s events,” the LAT’s Stephen Battaglio writes.

CNN announces Cali debate

Just announced: CNN will host a California gubernatorial debate between Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton on September 30. “Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate the event, which will take place in the Los Angeles area,” per Piper Hudspeth Blackburn’s story.

Today’s timely new nonfiction book releases

Today’s heap of new books reflects the time of year:

Utah governor Spencer Cox is out with “Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt,” billed as a “practical guide to depolarization,” pegged to the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Kirk assassination this Thursday.

The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell is out with “How to Eat an Elephant,” promising to tell readers how Democrats can “beat back the MAGA authoritarian threat,” two months ahead of the midterms. Among her messages: Dems must “rethink how they do communications from top to bottom — with much less reliance on mainstream media to carry their message. They have to build new communications and media platforms.”

And the new release at the top of my reading pile is Peter Bergen’s “All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror,” obviously timed to Friday’s 25th anniversary of 9/11.

“I wrote the new book because the students I teach, even some of the graduate students, were either not born or very young children on 9/11,” Bergen told me. “For them it’s a distant event as the Korean War is for me, and yet we all still live in a post-9/11 world.”

Just to name one example, “you can’t understand Trump’s first election victory in 2016 without reference to the ‘war on terror,’” the CNN national security analyst observed.

More for the fall bookshelf

The 9/11 anniversary also adds poignancy to Rebecca Blumenstein and Diana Kapp’s new release, titled “The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America.” The book details “The New York Times’s effort to save hundreds of lives during the 2021 Afghanistan evacuation” and follows four women who were resettled in the US. I peeked at an early copy of the book and was absolutely riveted.

>> Also out today: Victor Davis Hanson’s new release, “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement,” is the best-selling book on Amazon right now, thanks to Sunday night promotion on Mark Levin’s show. Trump gushed over Hanson on Truth Social, writing, “He understands me, perhaps better, than I understand myself.”

>> And there’s even more! Including Harlan Coben’s new memoir “Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft” and Priya Parker’s “The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict.”

First trailer for ‘Musk’

The first teaser trailer for Alex Gibney’s four-hour “Musk” documentary dropped last night ahead of the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival today. Set to dramatic footage of a rocket exploding, the trailer promises “an unflinching look at Earth’s most unchecked man.” The doc will hit theaters on October 16 and then HBO Max later this year. Here’s the trailer…

A new public media initiative

This morning the Poynter Institute and the Public Media Company announced a “national effort to reimagine a public media system built to serve communities for the next 50 years and beyond.” They’re calling it the Future of Public Media Initiative. Poynter’s Tom Jones has all the details here…

Today’s TV premieres

“The View” resumes this morning with all six co-hosts back for the new season. Wednesday will be especially interesting: Sen. Ted Cruz is one of the guests.

Jon Stewart is back on “The Daily Show” tonight (yes, on a Tuesday instead of Monday) after taking August off.

Jimmy Kimmel, too, is back on his late-night stage after a long break, and so is Jimmy Fallon.

Coming up tomorrow…

Wednesday is jam-packed with media world action: Apple hosts its product launch event in Cupertino. The GOP begins its first-ever midterm convention in Dallas. Oliver Darcy’s Status holds its first-ever summit in NYC. And the NFL season kicks off on NBC with a Super Bowl 60 rematch between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots.

ICYMI…

Some 🔑 stories from our summer break:

>> Tyler Lauletta wrote that Pablo Torre “deserves his victory lap” after the NBA largely vindicated his Pulitzer-winning reporting on the L.A. Clippers, following skepticism from critics and contrary reporting from ESPN, his ex-employer. (Awful Announcing)

>> And speaking of Torre, Cem Yolbulan argued that ESPN and sports media need to learn a lesson: “Take corruption by billionaire team owners more seriously.” (Sports Illustrated)

>> Benjamin Mueller and Glenn Thrush highlighted the role of podcaster Dan Bongino in a “sprawling” DOJ investigation of virus scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci. (NYT)

>> Clare Duffy and I profiled Rob Bonta, “the AG at the heart of some of the biggest legal battles in business.” (CNN)

>> Trump gained “fresh bipartisan support for a federal film tax credit” while an adviser to one of his Hollywood ambassadors said “legislation could come within weeks.” (Politico)

>> A man was sentenced to five years’ probation for sending hoax ransom demands to Savannah Guthrie’s family. (ABC15)

Emmy voters give ‘South Park’ another reason to taunt Trump

“‘South Park’ threw one final jab at President Donald Trump Sunday night as the show celebrated its Emmy win for Outstanding Animated Program,” Variety’s Jack Dunn wrote. The show’s official X account “posted a graphic of Trump with his pants and underwear around his ankles, holding an Emmy award triumphantly in the air.”

A caption above Trump read, “You finally got your Emmy,” alluding to the fact that Trump was nominated twice but lost both times.

Last but not least: Summer box office lessons

“Hollywood’s summer — by its accounting — was a triumph for the ages,” Brooks Barnes and Christine Zhang write. “Ticket revenue was not only the highest since 2013, but the second highest of all time.” But the numbers aren’t quite as impressive as they look.

It’s a “comeback,” for sure, analyst Wade Holden told the NYT, but when you adjust for inflation, it’s “more complicated.”

>> An important lesson for Hollywood to re-learn: THR’s Ryan Gajewski wrote that many of the summer’s biggest wins were “films that cost less than $25 million, upending conventional wisdom that only the priciest tentpoles can pack multiplexes.”