Talk:Vicky Ward

This edit request by an editor with a conflict of interest has now been answered.

Hi, I have rewritten the 'Journalism career' section of the article in my Sandbox.

User:Tatianacooper16/sandbox

Noting my conflict of interest, I am kindly requesting review of this version. It is all verified now. I know I made a lot of errors as a new editor, and I apologize again for not knowing about the COI rules and making edits directly. I am hoping this better cited section and my transparent request for review respects your policies and time. Thank you, Tatianacooper16 (talk) 19:21, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Pinging @LaffyTaffer for their help. Thanks very much. -- Tatiana Tatianacooper16 (talk) 19:12, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Tatianacooper16, unfortunately I don't handle edit requests myself very often, nor am I familiar enough with the subject or her field of work to be able to tell if your proposed edits are usable, so unfortunately you'll need to wait for this request to make it through the edit request backlog. That all said, I'm not immediately seeing anything glaringly wrong with the proposed changes. Thanks again for disclosing your COI and going through the edit request process. Best regards. Taffer😊💬_(she/they) 20:19, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi there @Tatianacooper16. I saw your message on my talk page and decided to take a shot at cleaning up this article. Unfortunately, I was not able to integrate very much of the material you wrote - while primary sources are okay to a certain degree, your draft was a bit overkill with articles written by Ms. Ward herself. Journalists can be a bit tricky to write about in this way, because what we really want to summarize here is what everybody else has to say about her, and coverage can be thin even for particularly well-known journalists. I brought the article up to a point where I was able to remove the maintenance templates, but I'm sure it can still be expanded from here - if you'd like to help, I'd suggest you start small with your requests. You can see a good example of a well-formatted and concise edit request here. Alternatively, just let me know what you think the most important missing details are, and I'll see if I can reasonably add them. All the best, MediaKyle (talk) 18:23, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi @MediaKyle. Thank you so much for your help. I do have small requests that I'll make below.

(1) Please add: She wrote about Hewlett Packard,^[1] a failed coup in Africa,^[2] Valerie Plame,^[3] Kate Middleton,^[4][5] the Getty,^[6] and Bernie Madoff.^[7] She wrote about cyber-terrorism expert Dmitri Alperovitch,^[8] and about Jared Kushner, about whom she later, in 2019, wrote a book.^[9] Ward also wrote about Mike Pence's Chief of Staff Nick Ayers,^[10] Robert and Rebekah Mercer's influence in the 2016 election,^[11] Blackwater's Erik Prince,^[12] and a $2 billion fraud in the modern art world.^[13]

(2) Please rephrase: Ward and James Patterson are co-writing a new book, which will chronicle the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.^[14][15]

(3) Please add: In June 2020, she joined the Council on Foreign Relations.^[16] In 2021, she launched the newsletter Vicky Ward Investigates.^[17] She was the host and co-producer of the Audible podcast Pipeline to Power: The 40-Year Plan to Capture the Supreme Court.^[18] In September 2023, she was appointed as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford.^[19]

Thanks for your help and I'm happy to answer any questions. Tatianacooper16 (talk) 18:53, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi Tatianacooper16. I think you might be misunderstanding what a Wikipedia article is supposed to be, I'm going to try to clear this up for you. Wikipedia is a lot different than anything you're used to dealing with for public relations - this is an encyclopedia, and above all else, it's a reference work. Wikipedia doesn't care at all what an article subject wants the world to know about them, only what has been reported about them by secondary, reliable, independent sources.

To be specific - in your above message, you wrote She wrote about Hewlett Packard, with a citation to the article she wrote about Hewlett Packard. This is inappropriate use of a primary source, because we have no indication that this article is important enough to be mentioned. That being said, there may be a reason to mention specific articles written by Ms. Ward, but only if those articles were discussed by someone else. For example, if she wrote a piece in The Placeholder Times, and then someone in the totally unrelated Newspaper Gazette wrote an article rebutting it, that would be something we would want to include.

For request (3), it seems the article already includes the information about the Council on Foreign Relations, and her appointment as a visiting fellow. I'm unsure whether the other two points warrant inclusion - do you have a secondary source that confirms those details? I will see if I can adjust the part about the upcoming book, though. Let me know if you have any more questions. All the best, MediaKyle (talk) 19:22, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your help editing and your constructive guidance. I just have one request which I'll place below in a new section. Tatianacooper16 (talk) 19:33, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi @MediaKyle. You informed me that I needed secondary sourcing to mention specific articles. Here is a tightened suggestion for articles by Vicky Ward, all citing independent news coverage that mentions the articles themselves. Please let me know if this meets the mark. Thank you!

Requested addition:

She wrote about Hewlett Packard,^[1] Valerie Plame,^[2] Kate Middleton,^[3] and Bernie Madoff.^[4] Ward also wrote about Mike Pence's Chief of Staff Nick Ayers,^[5] Robert and Rebekah Mercer's influence in the 2016 election,^[6] and Blackwater's Erik Prince.^[7] Tatianacooper16 (talk) 19:38, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi @MediaKyle,

I have two small requests:

1) I think it would be fair to add the following two topics Ward wrote about, because they were highly topical and most importantly covered in the mainstream media by Charlie Rose and Washington Monthly.

Ward wrote about Robert and Rebekah Mercer's influence in the 2016 election,^[1] and about Mike Pence's Chief of Staff Nick Ayers.^[2]

2) Also, can we please identify Brian Thompson as the UnitedHealth CEO, so readers know who the link is referring to?

Thank you again, Tatianacooper16 (talk) 18:55, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

This edit request by an editor with a conflict of interest has now been answered.

Hi! There are a few errors on the Vicky Ward page, and I hope they can be corrected. I have included secondary sources for all changes. Thank you!

1. The current "Journalism career" section lists Vicky Ward's previous role as Tina Brown’s editor. She was never Tina Brown’s editor. Can you rephrase the sentence from "Ward moved to New York City in 1997, where she worked at the New York Post and was Tina Brown's editor at Talk" to "Ward moved to New York City in 1997, where she worked at the New York Post [1] [2] [3] and was the executive editor at Talk. [4] [5]"

2. Can you correct the date: It was in 2015, not 2019, "that Ward said her 2003 profile of Jeffrey Epstein in Vanity Fair had included on-the-record accounts of Annie and Maria Farmer." [6]

3. Can you make it clear that Ward became the editor-at-large for Town & Country years before joining CNN, not after, as the Journalism career section suggests. This is widely reported on. [7] [8]

4. Can you make it clear that Ward published Kushner, Inc. in 2019. The text reads as if it were published in 2003. Rephrase: "That year, Ward published Kushner, Inc., a book about Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump [9] [10]" to "In 2019, Ward published Kushner, Inc., a book about Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump [9] [10]."

Thank you so much, Tatianacooper16 (talk) 19:00, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

 Done. Thanks for the request. I believe I've addressed everything here, let me know if there's anything else. Cheers, MediaKyle (talk) 23:40, 6 March 2026 (UTC)