The 60 Minutes program for Quibi, 60 in 6, will finally premiere this coming Sunday.
The show will deliver two new episodes on Sunday, June 14, with each lasting 10 minutes or fewer on Quibi’s mobile app. After the two-episode premiere, 60 in 6 will offer one original episode each Monday.
The program will offer breaking news and more evergreen stories, like its parent program.
The premiere episodes on Sunday will feature former Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Wesley Lowery from Minneapolis, where he has spent the last two weeks in the midst of protests and focusing on today’s modern movement for civil justice reform. Lowery sits down with George Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, who remembers his brother in an emotional interview. He also speaks with the Floyd family attorney, Benjamin Crump. They discuss why this moment feels different and where we go from here. In addition, Wesley talks to Rev. Al Sharpton, civil rights activist and founder of the National Action Network, just hours before eulogizing George Floyd.
The other episode will feature interviews with Jason Sole, president of the Minneapolis NAACP and criminal justice educator, Jeremiah Ellison from Minneapolis’ City Council and local community members as they discuss the city’s previous progress with police violence and the impact of George Floyd’s murder.
In addition to Lowery, the 60 in 6 lineup of correspondents includes Univision News anchor and reporter Enrique Acevedo, former CNN tech journalist Laurie Segall and CBS News international correspondent Seth Doane. The show is produced by 60 Minutes, led by 60 Minutes ep Bill Owens, who is supported by 60 Minutes executive editor Tanya Simon and 60 in 6 senior producer Jonathan Blakely.
Quibi, the mobile-first streaming content platform which launched on April 6, has gotten off to a poor start.
The service is seeing far fewer downloads and less overall usage than anticipated.
In a interview with The New York Times in May, Quibi co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said that rolling out the platform during the Covid-19 pandemic was “regrettable.”
“I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” Katzenberg said in the interview. “Everything. But we own it.”
Adweek’s Kelsey Sutton noted that one of Quibi’s issues includes the inability to share Quibi content on social media platforms. “There are a whole bunch of things we have now seen in the product that we thought we got mostly right,” Katzenberg told the Times, “but now that there are hundreds of people on there using it, you go, ‘Uh-oh, we didn’t see that.’”
But perhaps most importantly, Katzenberg said that Quibi’s Daily Essentials vertical, which houses its news programming, is seemingly “not that essential.”
A bad omen for 60 in 6, but perhaps the show can break that streak.