Rising Stars

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 2002 by Katie Caperton

Byline: Katie Caperton

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN 33, senior editor at Harper's, is not what you'd expect from a Harvard Ph.D. editing a 152-year old socio-political magazine. She's obsessed with TiVo and bloggers, and she'll never ever remind you of her academic pedigree. Her side gig as a TV critic for Slate.com, prompted one fan to create an online homage to Heffernan (www.suite101.com), calling her writing "electrifying." She landed her offline job at Harper's after years of writing and editing for The New Yorker, Talk, The New York Times, and Salon. And in her spare time - when she wasn't busy writing her dissertation on fin de siecle finance and its affect on American novels - she penned 1998's Emmy-nominated documentary "Matthew's Murder" for MTV. "I've just got on a 24-hour schedule," she explains. Harper's venerable editor, Lewis Lapham, says Heffernan "has written a good deal of criticism, so she has a quick mind."

KIRSTEN BOTTS WARD, 30, is associate media director at Deutsch Inc. Born and raised in London, Ward rocketed at her first job on this side of the pond, moving rapidly from assistant media planner to media supervisor at McCann Erickson. After heading to Deutsch in 1999 to broker deals for the agency's A-list accounts, she cannily arranged for Almay's big Times Square billboard to go up just days before New Year's Eve. Her boss, Peter Gardiner, Deutsch's chief media officer, says, "She is incredibly strategic and very insightful - just a smart media person and a smart marketing person. And that's a great combination." Recently, she convinced Revlon to drop a large amount of cash in order to dominate July's Vogue with a nine-page gatefold. She says, "I hammered them over the head enough times that they gave in. They totally realized the value of it afterwards.