NEW YORK — Mike Wallace, who turns 84 in May, says that next fall he will severely reduce his involvement with "60 Minutes," the CBS news magazine that he helped start in 1968.
Wallace, the oldest full-time news correspondent in network television, said he would cut his workload in half.
"The time has come," Wallace said last week at his office, which overlooks the Hudson River and is lined with photographs of world leaders and other television icons.
The withdrawal of Wallace, the face of the program since it began, effectively begins a slow and deliberate change of leadership at "60 Minutes" — the first in its 34-year history.
His scaling back comes as CBS News executives are beginning to focus on how to maintain the program as key players inch closer to retirement. The commentator Andy Rooney is 83; the correspondent Morley Safer is 70; and the creator and executive producer, Don Hewitt, is 79.
The program has undergone some wear and tear in recent years. Once an untouchable island within CBS News, late last year it faced production staff cutbacks for the first time in memory. Its viewers, on average in their mid- to late 50s, are older than the audience today's advertisers generally desire. Its record run of 23 years as one of TV's top 10 rated programs came to an end last year.
Still, "60 Minutes" is the top-rated news magazine on television — ranked 16th among all network programs on the Nielsen Media Research ratings list this season with an average audience of 15 million people. It is considered by many in its industry to be the highest-quality news magazine in all TV news. And it remains not only a vital revenue generator for CBS, a unit of Viacom, but also an important promotional platform for the network's other programs — one CBS hopes to have for years to come.
Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News, said the sister program of "60 Minutes," "60 Minutes II" — which was started in 1999 initially against Hewitt's wishes — could figure heavily in the future of "60 Minutes."
"That is a place where we are developing people who can potentially move over," he said. Jeffrey Fager, the "60 Minutes II" executive producer, is widely expected to take over for Hewitt, when the time comes.
Hewitt said that one person he might rely on to pick up the slack for Wallace is Bob Simon, the "60 Minutes II" correspondent who occasionally appears in segments for "60 Minutes." (He also mentioned Christiane Amanpour, the CNN war correspondent who contributes to "60 Minutes.")
For his part, Hewitt said that he did not foresee leaving the program soon. "I'm going to be 80, and I don't think I've missed a step," he said. "My aim is to die at my desk — I don't want to die anywhere else."
The other "60 Minutes" correspondents — Steve Kroft, 56; Leslie Stahl, 60; and Ed Bradley, 60 — are relative youngsters, he said, and do not seem to be preparing for an exit, either.