Joe Hagan is a contributing editor at New York and Vanity Fair magazines.
    Covering media, politics, finance and pop culture, he has interviewed everyone from Al Gore, Katie Couric and Henry Kissinger to the White Stripes and Buck Owens (the country legend's last interview). His in-depth reporting has given readers exclusive inside looks at the CBS News "Memogate" scandal in 2003 (and Dan Rather's subsequent battle with the network) and at The New York Times when Executive Editor Bill Keller faced off with the White House over its wiretapping program.
   Previously, he was a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he covered the Valerie Plame CIA-leak investigation and the ouster of Judith Miller from the Times. As a columnist at The New York Observer, he wrote the first profile of controversial memoirist James Frey. In the late 1990s he worked as a writer and reporter for media website Inside.com, Worth magazine and SmartMoney.com. He began as a fact checker for Esquire magazine.
    His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Times of London, GQ, Men's Vogue, Elle, Rolling Stone, Spin, Blender, The Believer, Civilization and Newsweek.com. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.
    Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Joe Hagan grew up a military brat, with stints in Washington, DC, Ohio, Texas and Maine. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York.