Bill Owens is the executive producer of 60 Minutes.
Owens led 60 Minutes to a breakout season in 2020-’21. The CBS News magazine made Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 every week and finished the season as the # 7 primetime broadcast and the only television program in the top 10 to grow its audience. He was named executive producer of 60 Minutes in February of 2019. In addition, Owens oversees 60 Minutes+, a new version of the Sunday classic streaming on Paramount+
Owens assumed the role of heading America’s #1 news program after 12 years of supervising the broadcast’s content in two senior positions. First as senior producer and then the executive editor, Owens had editorial and production input in the creation of nearly a thousand 60 Minutes segments from conception through screening and broadcast. Before taking his management role at the news magazine, the 32-year veteran of CBS News excelled at every level of responsibility while covering the gamut of international and domestic news events.
Owens was named to Hollywood Reporter’s 35 Most Powerful Media Leaders in April 2019.
In 2012, he co-executive produced and launched 60 Minutes Sports, a monthly sports edition of 60 Minutes that ran five seasons on Showtime. Owens also launched 60MinutesOvertime.com, the first website programmed entirely with originally produced 60 Minutes content, and has supervised its staff and production since its debut in 2010.
Owens joined 60 Minutes’ senior staff as senior broadcast producer in 2007 from the “CBS Evening News,” where he also served as senior broadcast producer. He first joined 60 Minutes in 2003 and worked with Scott Pelley producing segments that included coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the genocide in Sudan, climate change and a memorable profile of controversial NFL linebacker Bill Romanowski.
Before that, the Pelley-Owens team produced segments for 60 Minutes II, highlighted by an hour-long interview with President George W. Bush on the first anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The team also covered the American invasion of Iraq as a unilateral correspondent-producer team on the ground, contributing news-making reports to all CBS News programs.
In the late 1990s, Owens was the CBS News senior White House producer. Working with Pelley, Bill Plante and Rita Braver, he covered the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and broke major stories in the scandal that ran up to the historic event, in addition to many other Washington stories. Owens was the anchor producer for Paula Zahn and Harry Smith when they anchored “CBS This Morning.” He was the broadcast’s coordinating producer in New York before that.
In his first jobs for CBS, Owens served as a national desk assignment editor, field producer and desk assistant for CBS News and for WCBS-TV, the CBS-owned station in New York.
Owens began his journalism career in 1988 as a summer intern for CBS News working at the national political conventions in Atlanta and New Orleans.
In addition to the many awards garnered by the 60 Minutes stories he has shaped and supervised, Owens has received an Emmy Award and an IRE Award and contributed to a RTDNA Edward R. Murrow Overall Excellence Award. Towson University, Owens’ alma mater, awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in May 2012.
Owens is from Oyster Bay, New York. He was graduated from Towson in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mass communications. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children.
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