Websites are so back! Today’s website worth visiting is The Pelley Minutes, a clever project that puts the career of longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley into perspective. The show may only be 60 minutes long, but Pelley racked up nearly 37,000 minutes in his 37-year long career, reporting on almost everything humanity has put on display — from chess battlefields to real-world warzones.
Pelley was fired recently after standing up to the new bosses at CBS, who he has accused of “murdering” the legendary news show. In an interview with The New York Times, he warned of an alarming new world at the network where there’s “a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events.”
The Pelley Minutes is a tribute to journalism that helps show the throughline a great reporter can build over decades. I talked to the creators, Mary Adam and George Apfelbach, who created this love letter outside of their normal hours working at the Leo Burnett ad agency. The duo met three years ago and tell me they bonded over their passion for free speech and public media. Their first project together — a parody of Elmo getting laid off — became an instant hit that appeared on the Today show.
We’re gonna talk about your Scott Pelley project, but first I want to know about “Elmo Open To Work.” It’s even more hilarious having appeared on a Today show segment. How did it feel getting that kind of attention?
It was surreal. It was an idea that Mary had staring at her ceiling in the middle of the night, angry at the news PBS’s funding was being cut. So for it to go viral in the way that it did and make it on the Today show was awesome. And it taught us an important lesson: An idea is as big as people are willing to make it. Scale, in the traditional sense, is dead. You can have a single post reach six billion people with absolutely no paid media behind it. It just has to be interesting enough to people. Also, there’s nothing more fun than impersonating the world’s most beloved children’s TV show character. We highly recommend it.
You clearly care about journalism (thank you, we need all the support we can get). What in particular about Scott Pelley inspired you to create this project?
So many things. The first is that CBS News has been the crown jewel of American broadcast journalism, with 60 Minutes being the crème de la crème. And for it to be in such turmoil was very upsetting to us. When Scott Pelley got fired, and news of how all that stuff came to pass was leaked, we just felt like it was a rare moment of someone risking a lot to fight for what was right. Anyone who’s worked in a large corporation has probably had moments in all-hands meetings where they wished they had stood up and said something. Confronted people who were going after a company or institution they really cared about. When we read about him doing that, we wanted to celebrate it, even in a very small way. We wanted to show how much he’d given to 60 Minutes. We wanted to show that 60 Minutes isn’t really about the title. It’s about the work. It’s about the journalists. It’s about the segments they and their teams produce. That’s why we’re counting up the minutes. Because, literally and figuratively, what he and the other journalists have done there amounts to a lot more than 60 Minutes. The work is bigger than 60 Minutes.
If you could have your way, who would be leading 60 Minutes these days? Or, at least, what kind of person?
That’s a tough question. One that we’re not really qualified to answer. We’ll say this though: The person running 60 Minutes should probably be a person who’s dedicated to producing the best broadcast journalism in the world. It should be unbiased, honest, and speak truth to power. We don’t know everything that’s happening at 60 Minutes or CBS News, but judging by the people who have left, and what they’ve said, it doesn’t seem like that’s the goal there anymore.
You’ve told me you have a “passion for free speech and protecting public media.” What else have you seen that really inspires you? What are the institutions you think are worth defending? The real question here is: What brought two creatives like yourselves together to do this kind of work?
Another tough question! The institutions worth defending are the ones the vast majority of us rely upon and benefit from. When we see things like news organizations get bought up and public media get defunded — those are actions that don’t benefit a lot of people. They benefit a few very rich individuals. And we think that most people in this country would agree that that’s just not how it should go. There are certain things we all need to share to build a society that people want to live in, and unfortunately, now we seem to live in an age where we have to fight to keep every good thing we have in society from being sold to the highest bidder. We’re just trying to make these points in simple, creative ways that people will want to get behind.
The Pelley Minutes is a great website. Do you have more plans for it? And what can we expect from you in the future? This is obviously a great collaboration.
Thank you. Our plans right now are to keep tracking the minutes, share at the milestones, and get as many people to donate to independent journalism. The total count up should take around 25 days. We have a little surprise planned for when we hit 36,960 minutes.
As far as our plans, we’re going to keep making stuff. Right now, we’re working on a lot of stuff. We’re based out of Chicago, so we have a few things that center on the city specifically. The main thing sticking in our craw is the Chicago Bears threatening to move to Indiana (just to go along with the theme that billionaires ruin things we all love). So maybe we’ll try to do something about that!
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