Virginia Heffernan

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN writes "The Medium," a weekly column about Internet culture, for The New York Times Magazine. A frequent radio and roundtable guest who has appeared on "20/20" and other national television shows, she has given keynote addresses at South by Southwest, WebbyConnect, EconCeleb, Digital Hollywood and dozens of other tech, entertainment and business conferences. With an extensive Facebook network and some 3500 Twitter subscribers, she has also lectured at colleges and universities across the country, including Princeton, Dartmouth and NYU.

Before starting The Medium in 2007, she served for four years as a daily television critic for The Times, where, in addition to writing reviews, she contributed reported features and interviews with media figures including Sacha Baron Cohen, Simon Cowell, Barbara Walters, David Chase, Ellen Degeneres and Glenn Close. She also chronicled the convergence of television and the Internet in Screens, one of the first blogs on the Times's Web site. In 2007, Screens became The Medium, with influential and controversial posts that drew hundreds of comments.

Virginia began her career in journalism in 1994 as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. In 1998, she became a founding editor at Talk Magazine, where she edited cover stories on a wide range of subjects. In 2001, she worked as a senior editor at Harper's Magazine, and concurrently as a TV critic for Slate. At the time, the Columbia Journalism Review called her one of "ten young editors to watch," and Folio Magazine named her a "rising star."

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