For many growing up in America, any given Sunday was marked by the tick-ticking of the 60 Minutes stopwatch. The show, started in 1968, is a journalism dinosaur: a television news magazine that persists with in-depth investigations and stern-faced reporting. It has survived and prospered largely because of its immense pedigree — having served as the launchpad for news icons like Dan Rather, Mike Wallace and Diane Sawyer — and its intrepid style, pioneering, among other TV tactics, the uncomfortably close interview closeup. 60 Minutes takes its time, asks hard questions of those at the top and invariably ends with that venerable curmudgeon, Andy Rooney, a journalistic anachronism if there ever was one. All the while, the stopwatch, which has changed appearance over the decades, keeps on ticking.