Will Dana, Rolling Stone’s Managing Editor, to Depart

By RAVI SOMAIYA
photo by Richard Perry
The New York Times

Will Dana, the managing editor of Rolling Stone, will leave the magazine, just months after a controversial article about a supposed gang rape at the University of Virginia was retracted.

Mr. Dana, whose planned last day is Aug. 7, is not leaving for another job, and his successor has not been named. When asked if the departure was linked to the controversy over the discredited article, Rolling Stone’s publisher, Jann S. Wenner, said, via a spokeswoman, that “many factors go into a decision like this.”

In a statement, Mr. Dana said, “After 19 years at Rolling Stone, I have decided that it is time to move on.” He added: “It has been a great ride and I loved it even more than I imagined I would. I am as excited to see where the magazine goes next as I was in the summer of 1978 when I bought my first issue.”

Mr. Wenner, a founder of the magazine, said that Mr. Dana was “one of the finest editors I have ever worked with.”

Mr. Dana and Mr. Wenner both declined to be interviewed.

Rolling Stone and Mr. Dana had been widely criticized after the publication late last year of the article titled “A Rape on Campus,” which reported that a brutal gang rape occurred in 2012 at a fraternity party at Virginia. The article helped prompt a national conversation about sexual assaults on college campuses and sent the University of Virginia into turmoil.

In the weeks after publication, the article, which was based largely on the account of one student, named only as Jackie, fell apart. Police in Charlottesville, Va., said that after exhausting all leads they had found “no substantive basis” to support the article’s depiction of the assault.

The magazine commissioned an analysis of the article by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and its report in April cited failures at every stage of the reporting process. After the report was made public, Rolling Stone retracted the article.

The magazine has since been the target of lawsuits from an assistant dean at the university and by three members of the fraternity at the center of the article, who filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday.

Mr. Dana joined Rolling Stone in 1996 as a senior editor and became managing editor in 2005. He had also been editorial director of Rolling Stone’s sister publication, Men’s Journal.

A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2015, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Rolling Stone Managing Editor to Depart