Journalist Michael Hastings killed in car crash
Michael Hastings, a native Vermonter and a journalist widely known for his profile in Rolling Stone magazine of a general who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was killed Tuesday in a car crash in Los Angeles, according to multiple reports.
He was 33.
News of his death was reported Tuesday evening by Rolling Stone and by the website BuzzFeed, for which Hastings also wrote.
“We are shocked and devastated by the news that Michael Hastings is gone,” Ben Smith, BuzzFeed editor in chief, said in a statement posted online shortly before 7 p.m. Tuesday. “Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians. He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold.
“Michael was also a wonderful, generous colleague, a joy to work with and a lover of corgis — especially his Bobby Sneakers,” Smith continued. “Our thoughts are with Elise and the rest of his family and we are going to miss him.”
Hastings was a 1998 graduate of Rice Memorial High School in South Burlington.
His reporting on Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the subsequent story in June 2010 led to the commander’s resignation after he was quoted ridiculing President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and other administration officials.
“You never know how a story will be received,” Hastings told the Burlington Free Press shortly before the piece hit newsstands and as the article was being widely distributed online. “I knew the reporting was new and different, but I’m kind of surprised at the impact.”
Hastings remained a prominent figure in his home state. He is the subject of a cover story in the summer issue of Vermont Life. “Very sad news,” read a tweet from the magazine’s official account at 7:47 p.m.
“Great reporters exude a certain kind of electricity, the sense that there are stories burning inside them, and that there’s no higher calling or greater way to live life than to be always relentlessly trying to find and tell those stories,” Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana said in comments in an obituary posted Tuesday evening on the magazine’s website. “I’m sad that I’ll never get to publish all the great stories that he was going to write, and sad that he won’t be stopping by my office for any more short visits which would stretch for two or three completely engrossing hours. He will be missed.”