MEL Talks - Will Dana

Will Dana: A Life in Publishing. Will Dana has been a magazine editor since the fall of 1985, when he was an intern at Harper’s after graduating from Middlebury College. For the first decade of his career, he worked as a features editor at a number of magazines, including Esquire, 7 Days, Outside and Details, before joining Rolling Stone in 1996 as a senior editor. In 2006, he became Rolling Stone’s longest-serving managing editor, a post he held for nine years. He says, “My goal there was to return the magazine to its prominence as a place for edgy, fearless journalism.” In the years he ran Rolling Stone, they won six National Magazine Awards and were nominated for eight others. He assigned and edited some of the most widely-read and conversation-changing articles of the last few decades, among them Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Michael Hastings’ The Runaway General and Matt Taibbi’s ongoing investigations into the hidden roots of the financial crisis, a series of stories that contributed the phrase “Vampire Squid” to the lexicon and directly inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was also editorial director of Men’s Journal from 2008 to 2015.

Will plans to focus his talk on his days at Rolling Stone but will also reflect a little bit on the magazine business and it’s abrupt decline. He will leave plenty of time for questions.