Kate Betts

Currently she is a contributing editor at Time and The Daily Beast, among other freelance writing positions, and reporting on fashion for CNN.

in history in 1986 after completing an 127-page-long senior thesis titled "Beauty in the Streets: The Impact of Student-Worker Action on French Political Consciousness in the Events of May, 1968.

"[3] After graduating, she went to work in France as a freelance journalist[4] for Metropolitan Home, European Travel & Life and the International Herald Tribune.

[2] An article she wrote for one of these publications about boar hunting in Brittany caught the attention of publishing mogul John Fairchild.

He hired her as a features writer for Fairchild Publications' Paris bureau, overseeing fashion coverage for Women's Wear Daily, W and M magazines.

[1]She wrote stories about the Sénanque Abbey's lavender fields, interviewed Jeane Kirkpatrick and penetrated closed fashion shows.

The following year, 1991, she left Fairchild and Paris for New York and Condé Nast, where she took over as fashion news director at Vogue.

In 1999, Hearst offered her the chance to take over Harper's Bazaar, filling the vacancy left by Liz Tilberis, another former likely successor to Wintour, who had died earlier that year of ovarian cancer.

She also denied another report that staffers, who had supposedly starting calling her "Anna Junior", had been forbidden to have pictures of their families at their desks.

She let go two-thirds of the staff and hired new, established writers like Lynn Hirschberg and Bret Easton Ellis to cover topics like politics and art.

[4] During this time she was also the subject of a Lifetime documentary, Putting Baby to Bed: Wife, Mother, and Editor in Chief.

""I think it's exciting to have new blood in a magazine which hasn't been doing well for a very long time", said Oscar de la Renta.

Others warned that "the danger in turning a high-end fashion magazine into this young, pop-culture thing is that she'll come up with Jane.

[6] When asked about it later, Betts was philosophical about the experience: It was one of those things where it was a job you can't say no to, even though I was nine months pregnant.

[1]After Bazaar, Betts began doing freelance work for The New York Times Style section, and elsewhere in the paper.

I can't speak to anyone's agenda", Weisberger, who admitted she was curious as to why Betts had been assigned the first of two harsh reviews that ran in the Times' pages, responded in a Salon.com interview.

It was a special supplement focusing on fashion and related stories published six times a year with the U.S., Europe, and Asian editions of the magazine.

Betts again said she planned for the supplement to cover fashion within a broader social context as she had tried to do at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.

Time has retained Betts as a contributing editor, and hopes it could bring the supplement back when the economy recovers.