A life in the edit room

Warren Lustig has spent his entire career as a master storyteller. For almost three decades, he's been one of the quiet hands producing and editing stories for 60 Minutes, the most watched and honored television newsmagazine in history. He's a valuable contributor to the broadcast and has worked closely with many of the CBS News greats; Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Lesley Stahl, Bob Simon, Charles Kuralt, Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite and more recently Scott Pelley, Bill Whitaker and Anderson Cooper.

Lustig's creative flair, impeccable attention to detail and sensitive intuition have made his stories stand out from the rest. It's no wonder he remains in such high regard and has been justly recognized for his work; 21 Emmy Awards, 2 Peabodys and a Columbia DuPont. Among his many producer credits are “The Last Man Out”, a profile on the last man found alive in the aftermath of 9/11, and “Lightning in a Bottle”, a feature on Pixar animation studios which found Lustig in a rare, one-on-one meeting with then studio head and Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Lustig began his career in the 1970s as a freelance news cameraman, filming on the streets of New York. National exposure came while covering the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, PA. In 1980, an opportunity with the show PM Magazine meant a move to Miami and a switch from cameraman to editor. It was a change that would define his career. In less than two years, he won two Emmy Awards for editing and soon found himself back in New York working for the highly regarded Channel 2 News.

Recognized for his unique style, speed and enthusiasm, he was soon promoted to The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. There, he travelled the globe covering world changing events like Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the student uprising in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and the historic Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Moscow. Stateside, he covered countless presidential campaigns and conventions, natural and manmade disasters, and even covered the discovery of the RMS Titanic.

His talents carried him beyond the news division. In the 1990s, he produced high-end campaigns for the network's promotion department, worked with CBS Sports on The NFL Today and the NCAA Final Four Championship, and most notably covered three consecutive Winter Olympic Games in France, Norway, and Japan. His Emmy-winning opening sequence for the 1994 Games, See the Show, remains a favorite.