The journalist whose Rolling Stone interview with General Stanley McChrystal led to the top NATO general in Afghanistan losing his job has been killed in a car crash.

Michael Hastings, 33, was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles early on Tuesday morning (local time), his current employer, the BuzzFeed news website, confirmed.

Hastings's interview with General McChrystal, published in Rolling Stone in 2010 under the headline "The Runaway General", led directly to General McChrystal's resignation.

In the article the general and his staff were quoted as mocking civilian members of the Obama administration, forcing General McChrystal to call vice president Joe Biden to apologise.

"We are shocked and devastated by the news that Michael Hastings is gone," said Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, which Hastings joined in February last year.

"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 added.

General McChrystal was summoned to Washington by Mr Obama in June 2010 and was swiftly relieved of his command.

The article also quoted him as deriding the US special envoy to the Middle East, Richard Holbrooke, and saying he felt "betrayed" by the ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who had raised pointed objections to his war strategy.

Smith said Hastings "wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold."

Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana also paid tribute to Hastings, who was a contributing editor to the bi-weekly magazine. "Great reporters exude a certain kind of electricity," he said.

Such journalists give off "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."

Mr Obama replaced General McChrystal in Afghanistan with David Petraeus, the talismanic general who rescued a losing war in Iraq and was one of the most decorated and respected military people of his generation.

Petraeus went on to lead the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011, but resigned in disgrace in November 2012 after admitting an affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell, 20 years his junior.

ABC/wires