Katrina Vanden Heuvel - Career

Career

During her undergraduate years at Princeton, she served as editor of the Nassau Weekly, a school publication, and had an internship at National Lampoon magazine in 1978." She also worked as a production assistant at ABC television. According to a Princeton alumni publication, during her junior year, she had already worked "as a The Nation intern for nine months after taking the 'Politics and the Press' course taught by Blair Clark, the magazine's editor from 1976 to 1978" and "returned to The Nation in 1984 as assistant editor for foreign affairs".

As an owner of The Nation, she is one of a group of investors brought together in 1995 by then-editor Victor Navasky in a for-profit partnership to buy the magazine – then losing $500,000 a year – from investment banker Arthur L. Carter. This group of investors included, among others, actor Paul Newman; novelist E.L. Doctorow; former Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Alan Sagner; and Peter Norton, creator of the Norton Utilities software.

In 1989, vanden Heuvel was promoted to The Nation's editor-at-large position, responsible for its coverage of the USSR. In 1990, she co-founded Vy i My ("You and We"), a quarterly feminist journal linking American and Russian women. In 1995, vanden Heuvel was made editor of The Nation.

Vanden Heuvel's blog at The Nation is called "Editor's Cut". She also writes a column for The Washington Post op-ed page.

In a 2005 interview with Theodore Hamm in The Brooklyn Rail, vanden Heuvel describes the contents of The Nation and its larger role in news media: "Ideas, policy, activism, reporting, investigative reporting, as well as cultural pieces, reviews, writing. I hope people understand that about a third of this magazine, every week, is a very well edited, fascinating, cultural section, featuring reviews to people’s of the big books as well as some of the under-appreciated, under-the-radar, independent books and films and art. But the main part of The Nation is to put on the agenda the ideas and views and news that might not otherwise be there, to comment—from our perspective—on the news of the week—and to provide strategies and some measure of hope in these times."

She is the co-editor of Taking Back America – And Taking Down The Radical Right (Nation Books, 2004) and, most recently, editor of The Dictionary of Republicanisms (Nation Books, 2005). She is also co-editor (with Stephen F. Cohen) of Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers (Norton, 1989) and editor of The Nation: 1865–1990, and the collection A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy and September 11, 2001.

She is a frequent commentator on American and international politics on ABC's This Week, and also on MSNBC, CNN and PBS. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Boston Globe.

Vanden Heuvel serves on the Institute for Policy Studies Board of Trustees.

On 6 November 2012, she was invited to a debate hosted by Dutch TV channel NOS, to discuss some issues regarding the 2012 US Elections. Half-way down the debate she left the studio after being called a "liar" by her opponent. A few minutes later, she returned to the studio, saying she "loves Holland, but that this is unworthy of TV".