Award-winning journalist Michael Hastings dies

Adam Silverman | Burlington Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Journalist Michael Hastings dead at 33 Award-winning journalist and war correspondent Michael Hastings, whose unflinching reporting ended the career of a top American army general, died early Tuesday in a car accident in Los Angeles, his employer and family said.

Hastings wrote story credited with ending career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal

Hastings wrote about politics for the Buzzfeed news website

The journalist was 33 years old

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 first reported Tuesday evening by the website BuzzFeed, for which Hastings also wrote, and by Rolling Stone.

"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.

"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 Obama, Vice President Biden and other administration officials. The story was titled "The Runaway General" and resulted from the considerable access to McChrystal and others that Hastings was granted.

"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."

"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."

The L.A. Police Department was unable Tuesday night to release the name of the man killed in the early morning wreck that media reports said was Hastings, spokesman Officer Christopher No told the Burlington Free Press. No said information could be made available later Tuesday or Wednesday.

The crash occurred at about 4:25 a.m. in Hollywood near North Highland and Melrose avenues, just north of the Wilshire Country Club. A vehicle crossed the median, slammed into a tree and burst into flames, No said. The male driver, believed to be the car's only occupant, was pronounced dead at the scene. No said he did not know the make and model of the vehicle.

Video and photos from the scene posted on the website of L.A. television station KTLA showed a mangled car crumpled against a tree and engulfed in flames. The KTLA report quoted LAPD Officer Lillian Carranza as saying the car appeared to be speeding when the crash occurred.

No told the Free Press that he could not confirm that report.

Reports said Hastings is survived by his wife, Elise Jordan.

Hastings reported on the Iraq war for Newsweek from 2005-08, and during that time, his girlfriend, war correspondent Andrea Parhamovich, was killed in an ambush. He wrote a memoir about the experience, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story.

News of Hastings' death Tuesday prompted an outpouring of grief among journalists and others on Twitter.

"His death is beyond horrible," tweeted Ezra Klein, a blogger and columnist for the Washington Post and contributor to MSNBC, among others.

"I was and remain a huge @mmhastings fan," wrote Anthony De Rosa, editor in chief at Circa and an adjunct journalism professor at New York University, referring to Hastings by his Twitter handle. "Completely shocked at the moment. My condolences to his friends and family."

"Like David Halberstam, Michael Hastings reported fearlessly from dangerous war zones only to die in a car crash. Awful," tweeted Michael Cooper, national correspondent for the New York Times.

Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize winner who covered the Vietnam War, was killed in a car crash in 2007 — also in California.