Bill Owens, the former executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” is joining the creator-led media startup Newpress as executive producer, per The Hollywood Reporter. The hire coincides with a $12 million funding round led by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective.

Owens exited “60 Minutes” last year and has not held another role since. At Newpress, he will work with the company’s creators to develop new shows and build out production.

The funding round includes Jesse Angelo, CEO of Checker Media; David Leavy, former COO of CNN Worldwide; and Brent Montgomery, CEO of Wheelhouse Entertainment. Patrick Steel, former CEO of POLITICO, is also investing and will join Newpress’s board. YouTube creator Mark Rober is an investor in the company as well.

Newpress was founded by YouTube filmmakers Johnny and Iz Harris, and the company encompasses Johnny Harris’s existing YouTube channel. Newpress plans to launch several new shows in the coming months, working toward a longer-term goal of 12 to 16 channels led by creators who are subject-matter experts.

“In getting to know Johnny and Iz over the past year, I’ve seen the sophistication they bring to their storytelling and couldn’t be more excited to be joining them on March 1,” Owens said in a statement. “We have the unique opportunity to bring the highest standards of traditional journalism to a genuinely new model. They have built trust with a huge audience that legacy institutions are increasingly struggling to reach.”

“Newpress is built on the belief that people, navigating an increasingly complex world, want to learn about the world from humans they trust,” Johnny and Iz Harris said in a joint statement. “Now with Emerson Collective’s investment and Bill’s leadership, we can build a new type of organization based around innovative, trusted and context-driven storytelling at scale.”

Peter Lattman, managing director of media at Emerson Collective, framed the hire as a complement to Harris’s existing strengths. “Johnny is a gifted storyteller who makes complex subjects compelling and accessible,” Lattman said. “In Bill Owens, they’re adding a world-class journalist who brings the rigor and production excellence that defined his tenure at 60 Minutes.”

Newpress launched in February as what Johnny Harris described as “a corner of the internet for good faith, algorithm-free community discourse,” built around a collective that also includes Sam Ellis of “Search Party,” Christophe Haubursin of “Tunnel Vision,” and former New York Times columnist Max Fisher of “The Bigger Picture.” The group claims more than 10 million combined subscribers and followers. Its model lets community members contribute local knowledge, expertise, or research to stories in progress, an approach Harris said extends work he has done informally for years. The platform offers a free contributor tier and a $60-per-year founding membership with ad-free access and live creator AMAs.

Owens’s hire adds a veteran of appointment-television journalism to a company explicitly positioning itself against algorithmic distribution, at a moment when creator-led outlets are drawing on traditional media’s talent pool for editorial credibility.

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