Andy Hirschfeld

Reporter AJ English / bylines: Daily Beast, Slate, CNBC etc / on-air: NPR, Marketplace etc / ex: CNN, CBS / [email protected] / views expressed are my own

[New York Magazine @NYMag]

The meltdown at ‘60 Minutes’ has transfixed the media world this week, as Bari Weiss fired deeply respected staffers and correspondents, installed broadcast-news outsider Nick Bilton as the show’s executive producer, and sparked a messy standoff with Scott Pelley, who grilled his new boss and accused Weiss of “murdering” the show — all before being shown the door himself. A pointed termination letter, along with a stream of good-bye emails, statements, and rebuttals, have laced the saga with claims of insubordination, incompetence, and bias toward the Trump administration.

To Steve Kroft, who spent three decades at ‘60 Minutes’ before retiring in 2019, the show, “as the audience has known it, no longer exists.”

“They’ve made it clear — they being the new management, Bari Weiss and David Ellison — that they want to go to a completely different format, model, call it what you want,” he says. Kroft is not sure, precisely, what 60 Minutes will look like when it resumes: “It seems almost impossible for me to imagine what kind of a show they can put on in September.”

Read our full interview with Kroft: https://t.co/sXA4ZxtxhV

[Andy Hirschfeld @andyreports]

@tmavuram It's a bad method. This is human judgement thing. The people who think like this have no business planning anything.

[Andy Hirschfeld @andyreports]

I hateeeee to say it but people like this should have no role in planning anything. Assessing who is a good fit for an event is a human judgment thing.

[eliza @elizalian]

600+ RSVPs for the tech week panel i'm hosting. exported the entire list from partiful, gave claude a very specific prompt to score (google search, linkedIn, twitter), it determined the 300 people we admitted.

i hateeeee to say it but being offline is no longer an option in a post ai world

[Jessica Schiffer @jessicaschiffer]

I did not expect this I-am-very-pissed-off tweet to blow up the way it did, but I think it speaks to the desperation many journalists feel right now, myself included.

A lot of us are trying to carve out independent paths because the traditional media system is broken. But that alt path isn't easy either. It only works if people are willing to support the reporting they're consuming.

I also understand that subscriptions add up. One thing the industry hasn't solved is bundling. Most readers can't realistically subscribe to every independent publication they enjoy, and I suspect many would if there were a better way to do it.

[Jessica Schiffer @jessicaschiffer]

If you want journalism to exist, maybe don't screenshot entire paywalled stories and post them on Twitter. You're not sticking it to the media industry, you're just making it harder for independent reporters to get paid for their work. Absolute loser behavior.

[Dan Therriault @dantherriault]

Bari Weiss also just fired producer Tanya Simon. I worked with Tanya Simon on the Duke Lacrosse Case at HBO. She’s a brilliant news producer, intelligent, balanced and passionate. She withstood a macho cowboy culture at 60 Minutes, bullying by Senior Producer Michael Radutzsky and leader Jeff Fager accused of sexual misconduct, both were dismissed.

Ironically, after all that male aggression Tanya gets her head chopped off by hatchet woman - Bari Weiss - for political reasons.

[Scott Nover @ScottNover]

One of many eye-popping exchanges between Scott Pelley and Nick Bilton in this morning’s meeting:

[Igor Bobic @igorbobic]

“I look forward to talking to you in a one-on-one setting as these meetings are scheduled. And enjoy the bagels.”

The “60 Minutes” staff applauded Mr. Pelley after Mr. Bilton departed. https://t.co/p8R2i7DG37

[katie honan @katie_honan]

NYPD overtime estimates for the first seven days of July — with FIFA and Sail250 and Taylor Swift’s wedding — are $35-42 million, @NYPDPC says at executive budget hearing. The Swift part did have a chuckle after it.

[New York Magazine @NYMag]

“There are a lot of people offering to help me who have no ability to help me,” Jimmy Kimmel says with a laugh. It’s a Monday in April, and the late-night host is sitting behind the desk in his office above the ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ studio in Hollywood, scrolling through his messages. He is dealing with his third major standoff with President Donald Trump in less than a year, and friends keep checking in.

When CBS announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ in July 2025, Trump said that Kimmel was “next.” Two months later, ABC suspended ‘JKL!’ after Kimmel remarked on Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination in a monologue; the network brought the show back a week after that, prompting Trump to threaten ABC with legal action. Now, the source of Trump’s rage is a joke from a mock White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast Kimmel performed, which included a line describing Melania as having “a glow like an expectant widow.” A few days later, Trump posted a statement to social media demanding Kimmel be fired.

No one inside the ‘JKL!’ offices seems all that worried.

“Typically, my inclination is to fight back,” Kimmel says. “In that way, Donald Trump and I are not so different.”

Kimmel and his fellow late-night hosts have spent the past decade adapting to the Trump era, developing different responses to viewers’ hunger for Trump evisceration. But the president wants him out, late night is dying, and Kimmel — the longest-running, highest-profile host of the television genre — is tired. “I feel a little bit defeated by it,” Kimmel told writer Kathryn VanArendonk after he watched the ‘The Late Show’ finale. “In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m looking at my own future.”

So what does the end, and future, look like for Jimmy Kimmel?

In our latest Cover Story, VanArendonk sits down with the late-night host: https://t.co/a5n8diyeoR

[Josh Kraushaar @JoshKraushaar]

"Even Anthropic, often held up for its commitment to ethical A.I. development, has been unwilling to pay for the high-quality journalism it uses in its products."
https://t.co/cAzB2yuO0F

[Jeremy Barr @jeremymbarr]

News: Dozens of CBS News (and 60 Minutes) veterans sent a letter to David Ellison on Monday urging him to guarantee editorial independence on the show in light of Thursday's firings of top producers and correspondents.

"The wholesale dismissal of editorial management, without a public pledge to maintain the values, standards, and traditions of this program, puts the legacy of 60 Minutes in jeopardy.”

https://t.co/jtLKcxt3o9

[Brian Stelter @brianstelter]

Scott Pelley: "She is murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that."

[Carly Martinetti @PRcarly]

82% of journalists now use AI in their work, per Muck Rack's 2026 State of Journalism report. Most PR pros think this is the story.

The real story is where it’s all going wrong:

✓ AI is great at transcribing interviews.
✗ AI is terrible at pulling out quotes with strong human impact but little subject impact.

✓ AI is helping reporters research your client faster than ever.
✗ AI is also pulling outdated info from 2023 and presenting it as current fact.
(The Washington Post's test of major AI tools found this was a consistent flaw across the board)

✓ AI is helping fact-check coverage at scale.
✗ AI is also hallucinating quotes and fabricating sources.
(Publications from the NYT to Wired to the Chicago Sun-Times have published retractions in the last 12 months)

✓ AI can summarize a 40-page report in 30 seconds.
✗ AI also "summarized" a Guardian book review into a NYT freelancer's draft and got him fired.

✓ AI helps reporters keep up with a 200-pitch inbox.
✗ AI-powered inbox tools like Sanebox and Copilot also filter out perfectly good pitches it *thinks* are AI generated, even if they’re not.

✓ AI is changing how journalists work.
✗ AI is not changing what makes a story worth telling.

ALL THIS MEANS:

Your pitch is being skimmed by a human, possibly screened by a tool (one that’s confident even when it’s wrong), and potentially summarized into a draft that you'll see published with details you don’t recognize.

ADVICE FOR PR PROS:

→ Tighten the subject line
→ Front-load the proof
→ Make the angle specific (so that an AI can't reduce it to a generic trend)

The rules of engagement are changing incredibly fast.

PR folks, any other tips you’d offer for our colleagues?

[Dora Pekec @dorapekec]

Mayor Mamdani signs an “executive order” to repeal NYC kids bedtime during the Knicks finals :)

[Corbin Bolies @CorbinBolies]

NEW: In an address to the World News Media Congress, NYT publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned AI companies' choices “appear likely to cause a great deal of unnecessary harm” and said news orgs have been “too quiet, too passive and too fragmented” in the face of AI’s “abuses.”
https://t.co/G3VlXdcL6g

[Natalie Korach @NatalieKorach]

Charles Forelle, a top Weiss deputy and managing editor of CBS News, interjected, telling Pelley that he was being "rude."

"This is not actually productive," Forelle said. "This is not an interview."

"It's working for me," Pelley replied.

[Andy Hirschfeld @andyreports]

Trump halts $1.8bn ‘anti-weaponisation’ fund amid bipartisan backlash https://t.co/6EoOdSgB8E via @AJEnglish

[Jeremy Barr @jeremymbarr]

UPDATE: Scott Pelley called out Bari Weiss, saying in the meeting: "She’s murdering 60 mins. She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that."

[Robert McCartney @McCartneyWP]

Shocking, if true. “60 Minutes” has been gold standard for broadcast journalism for decades.