The great ‘60 Minutes’ freakout about the future of news

Scott Pelley isn’t the only journalist forced out of a job because of changing media dynamics. But his ouster from CBS News and 60 Minutes amid the Bari Weiss-ification of the operation have caused a lot of worry about the future of news. It also brought to mind my own connection to the storied institution of CBS.

When my mother graduated from high school in a small Wisconsin town, she immediately headed to the big city of Chicago for better career prospects. There she worked a number of jobs and eventually met my father in the church choir. But somewhere between her arrival in the Windy City and dating Dad, she got to know Kurt Weihs, a CBS designer. Weihs, who designed the CBS eye logo along with Bill Golden, told my mother that he based the eye design on her eyes.

At least that’s what my late mother said. Weihs, a Holocaust survivor who spent most of the rest of his life in New York City, apparently was in Chicago at the right time to have met my mother. But my siblings and I decided it just became a line he told every pretty young woman—”I based the CBS logo on your eyes.”

But maybe my mom believed it enough that it’s the reason we grew up watching CBS Evening News every night and 60 Minutes every Sunday. From Walter Cronkite to Dan Rather, from hidden camera ambush reports to ground-breaking in-depth interviews, CBS News and the daily newspapers were the main ways we got our news. Significantly, one we paid for, the other we didn’t. Today, the economic model for both of those media have broken down.

We all know that newspapers have been hollowed out, as classified and other advertising fled their pages and hedge funds became the new owners, apparently interested mostly in the valuable real estate owned by the papers. (I remember well Bay Area News Group’s Josh Richman complaining publicly about the owner’s relentless pursuit of real estate magic; here in Chicago, the same owner sold the historic—and awesome—Tribune Tower, which is now tony condos.) As a result, you can now pay a lot more for your ever-shrinking print newspaper. TV news has also been downsized, and the Orbánization of American journalism continues apace, as regime favorites buy up influential news operations. Such as CBS News.

Digital-based news has not proved to be a viable successor. For just one example, journalist Harry Cheadle recently wrote on Persuasion about his experience at Vice Media, which went from a magazine to a multimedia company to, once again, a magazine. He lays out the folly of the ad-clicks-will-make-us-rich plans of the Millennial sites like Buzzfeed and its ilk. In brief: It just didn’t work.

In my days working at Internet World magazine around the turn of the century, I followed the merger of old-timey Time Warner and new-timey AOL to become AOL Time Warner. The spectacular failure of that attempt to merge old and new media produced some astounding numbers in the news (such as AOL stock losing hundreds of billions of dollars in value).

And now The Onion is back in print, and apparently it’s doing fine.

This presents a problem for journalists writing about it, however. That’s because according to most journalism stylebooks, we style a publication’s names in italics if it’s a print publication, but in roman (i.e., not italics) text if it’s online-only or is the name of the corporate overlord. So The Onion began as The Onion, then became The Onion and is now The Onion—but is also The Onion. All clear?

Anyway, humor publication The Onion, based in Chicago and owned since 2024 by Global Tetrahedron, for years was known for its website and social media posts, mostly getting by on funny headlines that created no need to click through for the full story or video. But the site’s new-ish owners are heading into the future by going back to the publication’s past. The Onion has reportedly sold 70,000 subscriptions — and growing — at $99 a year (that’s nearly $7 million so far, which would make many publishers die of envy). The website will remain, and the company is gearing up to relaunch Infowars, the Alex Jones conspiracy platform it purchased out of bankruptcy and plans to use as a digital comedy website parodying the ilk of its former self.

A digression is in order, because I was there at the inception. Or at least I was inception-adjacent. The Onion began as a weekly newspaper on the campus of the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where I was a student and an editor of one of the campus dailies, The Badger Herald. The Onion was a coupon paper—stories filled most of each page, with coupons along the bottom for local pizzerias and other establishments. If the coupons broke no new ground, the writing did. The paper was consistently funny and even pointed. A number of the writers and editors contributed to the campus dailies, but they did not hesitate to poke fun at us and were usually spot-on. For example, in one side-by-side comparison of the two papers, our leftwing competitor was said to support the El Savadoran Marxist guerrilla group FMLN; the Herald was said to misspell FMLN. Alas, we were occasionally proofreading-challenged. Such ribbing annoyed some of my colleagues, but I had a thicker skin and I thought it was funny.

Eventually The Onion expanded to other campuses, and before long it became a national presence. It went through a number of owners, ceased print publication in 2013, and then, as noted above, returned to the paper world more recently.

Why would anyone pay for a print product for content that they could get free online? It’s one way to show their support for the company and its product; it’s also a good — to use a Silicon Valley term — form factor, presenting content in an aesthetically pleasing and creative way.

We’re in an interregnum. People can easily say what no longer works—three big networks that make billions of dollars from advertising, or thick newspapers making millions of dollars from classified and display ads, plus subscriptions—but right now, no one knows what model will work for news media. Online advertising and clicks doesn’t produce anywhere near the volume needed to support, and nonprofit news is reliant on generous supporters. Individual journalists have relocated to Substack and reinvented themselves as lone wolves.

This is not the first time the news industry has undergone fundamental changes and faced what it feared was existential threats. When AM radio stared death in the face in the wake of the rise of FM radio and television, it reinvented itself as a platform for news and talk, where millions of people got their news, weather and traffic on the hour every hour. When a Georgian billboard-ad-executive-turned-broadcaster named Ted Turner created Cable News Network (CNN) in 1980, people worried that the news world couldn’t take the saturation and competition. It did. CNN was once the danger; now it is the industry player insiders worry about losing.

This is not the first time the news industry has undergone fundamental changes and faced what it feared was existential threats. When AM radio stared death in the face in the wake of the rise of FM and television, it reinvented itself as a platform for news and talk, where millions of people got their news, weather, and traffic on the hour every hour. When a Georgian billboard-ad-executive-turned-broadcaster named Ted Turner created Cable News Network (CNN) in 1980, people worried that the news world couldn’t take the saturation and competition. It did. CNN was once the danger; now it is the industry standard the insiders worry about losing.

And if the big threat, at 60 Minutes and The Washington Post and elsewhere, is a constriction in the number of ideas and points of view received by the public, well, we’re in for continued turbulence. But previous changes from CNN to AM to social media and onward have resulted in more voices finding their places and making it more difficult to silence an opposition. But getting to the next “new normal” could take a while, and we’ll go through a lot of friction to get there.

People say “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” But that’s not true; the truth is, things never stay the same.

A shortened version of this article appeared on The Voice of San Francisco.