A woman and the sea - The Taft School

My Back Pages
A Satisfied
Mind
“Will Dana and I get along
great,” says Wenner, who promoted
him in May. “He’s got
my deep respect, and we’ve
been working very closely together
for quite a few years.
He’s been in training for the
job for a long time, and he
got it on his own merits and
hard work.”
Prior to the promotion,
Dana was one of three deputy
managing editors, but he’s
held a number of roles in his
nine years at the magazine.
During his stint as the political
editor, he interviewed most
of the major figures in the last
presidential campaign.
Dana clearly does his
homework. For the most part,
his interviews are straightforward
questions and answers,
but he writes introductions for
each that let the reader know
exactly what’s at stake. Among
his many subjects, he has interviewed
John Kerry, Tom
Brokaw, Ted Kennedy, Howard
Dean, Al Sharpton, Wesley
Clark, Thomas Friedman, and
Dennis Kucinich.
“Kucinich. I loved him,”
says Dana. “That was the
most fun because it was just
him and three other people.
I was sitting next to him
on the plane, sitting next to
him in the van. I followed
him for a couple legs of that
trip. When Kerry was going
there were tons of people
around him. Dean, by the
time I got to him, he was at
the height of his campaign.
With Kucinich, no one else
was talking to him.”
The Times
They Are
A-Changin’
Now that he’s running the
magazine, Dana says his concerns
are more conceptual
and amorphous: “I have to
think about the whole equation,”
he says. “Is the rock
section working? Do we need
to think up more special issues?
Did we mess up by not
putting Kanye West on the
cover before Time did?”
In the course of a morning
he suggests two different energy-related
stories to editors who
pop in and out of his office with
questions. He’s obsessed, he
says, with energy. “It’s the biggest
story out there, and we’re
not talking about it. We have
an energy crisis, but the general
sense of how much or what the
crisis entails is hardly discussed.
They write about oil issues, but
they don’t get it or don’t want
to get it. And it just amazes me.
This is topic number one.
“In Japan this is the focus,
and here you’d never know—
‘buy an SUV and burn more
gas.’ So I try to get those issues
out there,” he adds. “We
want to get beyond the chicken-little
approach and look
at the people who are rolling
up their sleeves and trying to
find ways to solve it.”
But Dana wants to be
clear: Rolling Stone is not a policy
magazine. “We try to treat
Will Dana ’81 interviewed Vice President Al Gore during the 2000
election. Photo courtesy of Rolling Stone
our readers with intelligence,
but we don’t see it as our job
to get deep into every policy
discussion,” he says. “Other
people do that better; it’s not
where we’re going. We’ll cover
the war in Iraq, or the war on
drugs. Long articles are worth
doing, as long as they aren’t
boring. Good articles are not
just about facts; we’re trying
to tell stories.”
National affairs may be
only two or three pages per issue,
but the issues they choose
to cover are always provocative.
And Rolling Stone takes a more
partisan approach than standard
news media. “I would say
the difference is that we don’t
hide our bias, but we’re fair.
Our stories generally have an
argument to them,” he adds,
“but we don’t distort the facts.
Being fair and being objective
are two different things.”
Like a Rolling
Stone
The cover discussion over,
Dana is back in his own office,
which is a mirror image of the
photo editor’s. He leans back
in his chair and puts his now
bare feet up on the desk. It is
uncluttered, a little dusty at the
edges, but organized. An Apple
flat-screen monitor dominates
one corner and chimes like a
cowbell every few minutes announcing
new e-mail messages.
The only personal item in the
room is a black-and-white photo
of his 7-year-old son on the
shelf behind him. [Dana lives
in Manhattan with his wife
Ellen Tien, who writes for the
New York Times Sunday Style
section, and their son Jack.]
Features editor Eric Bates
leans in the doorway to see if
Dana has time to talk and then
takes the chair by the glass wall.
They discuss the draft of an article
about the mission to Mars,
deciding what order things
should go in—the vision behind
it, the reality, the challenge,
and the why—as well
as where the draft still needs
fine-tuning and what questions
they’d like it to answer.
“I think it needs to really
explain the scope of the chal-
24 Taft Bulletin Fall 2005