A contributing editor is a magazine job title that varies in responsibilities. Most often, a contributing editor is a freelancer who has proven ability and readership draw. The contributing editor regularly contributes articles to the publication but does not actually edit articles. At smaller magazines, the title may imply a staff member with regular writing responsibility and some editorial duties.

When a "contributing editor" is listed on the title page of a book, the term generally designates a person who has served as some kind of consultant in the book's preparation but who is not responsible for the book's final content.

Eleanor Clift (born July 7, 1940) is a political reporter, television pundit and author. She is currently a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine. Her column, "Capitol Letter" is posted each week on the Newsweek and MSNBC websites. She is a regular panelist on the nationally syndicated show The McLaughlin Group, which she has compared to "a televised food fight". She is also a political contributor for the Fox News Channel.
Clift is a Board Member at the IWMF (International Women's Media Foundation).

Clift was born Eleanor Roeloffs in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of immigrants from the island of Föhr in the North Sea. She grew up in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, where her parents ran a deli in Sunnyside. Clift was raised a Lutheran and attended Hofstra University and Hunter College. She began her career as a secretary at Newsweek, and is one of the first female reporters to earn an internship from the secretary pool. She began her broadcast career on The Diane Rehm Show on WAMU-FM, Washington, D.C., as a Friday week-in-review panelist. She became known to listeners for her good-natured acceptance of ribbing from other panelists and callers to the program.^{[citation needed]}

Caroline Glick is an American-Israeli journalist for Makor Rishon and is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. She is also the Senior Fellow for Middle East Affairs of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy.

Glick was born in Chicago and grew up in the Hyde Park neighborhood, and graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. She immigrated to Israel in 1991 and joined the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

She worked in the IDF's Judge Advocate General division during the First Intifada in 1992, and while there edited and co-authored an IDF-published book, Israel, the Intifada and the Rule of Law. Following the Oslo Accords, she worked as coordinator of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. She retired from the military with the rank of captain at the end of 1996. She worked for about a year as the assistant to the director general of the Israel Antiquities Authority. She then served as assistant foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She returned to the US to get her Master of Arts in Public Policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, in 2000.

The American Spectator is a conservative U.S. monthly magazine covering news and politics, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and published by the non-profit American Spectator Foundation. From its founding in 1967 until the late 1980s, the small-circulation magazine featured the writings of authors such as Thomas Sowell, Tom Wolfe, P.J. O'Rourke, George F. Will, Malcolm Gladwell, Patrick J. Buchanan, and Malcolm Muggeridge, although today the magazine is best known for its reports in the 1990s on Bill Clinton and its "Arkansas Project", funded by businessman Richard Mellon Scaife and the Bradley Foundation.

The American Spectator was founded as The Alternative in 1967 by Tyrrell and other students at Indiana University, and was originally published in a tabloid format (it is now published in a traditional magazine format).

After operating under the name The Alternative: An American Spectator for several years, in 1977 the magazine changed its name to The American Spectator because, in editor Tyrrell's words, "the word 'alternative' had come to be associated almost exclusively with radicals and with their way of life." In fact, Tyrrell had started the magazine as a conservative alternative to the student radicalism at the nation's universities in the 1960s. The Spectator is also a British magazine of somewhat similar format and anti-establishment conservatism.

Jon Meacham (born May 20, 1969) is executive editor and executive vice president at Random House. A former editor of Newsweek and a Pulitzer Prize winning bestselling author and a commentator on politics, history, and religious faith in America, he is a contributing editor to Time magazine and editor-at-large of WNET Public Media, the New York public television station.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Meacham attended St. Nicholas School, the McCallie School and the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, graduating summa cum laude in English Literature; he was salutatorian and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He is an initiate of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity and member of the Sewanee class of 1991.

An only child, Meacham spent his high school years living with his grandfather, Judge Ellis K. Meacham. A legendary figure in Chattanooga and author of three Napoleonic-era maritime novels about the Bombay Marine of the East India Company, Judge Meacham is credited with giving Meacham his interest in history, literature, and politics.