"FWD is a way to share things. To pass them on. To nudge the conversation about technology in a different direction--maybe not the next level, exactly, but at least a different one. It's fundamentally social, which is simply the way more and more of the web works now. Social is the web's new reality."

His little manifesto got us thinking. Just about every time the well funded news site makes a big announcement, a new staffer gives the meta-media a couple of quotes about the value and the allure of the social web.

As we recall, it all started when BuzzFeed hired Ben Smith as its editor in chief. A well-regarded Politico blogger, his faith in social content distribution was like a vote of confidence from a community of journalists who are digitally native but still serious about journalism.

“There is nothing more exciting for journalism and reporting than the social web,” said Mr. Smith. “Social media is what moves a story. It has become the primary way people, from plugged-in insiders to casual readers, get their news. BuzzFeed is the best in the world at distributing content on social sites, and it is a tremendous opportunity to join BuzzFeed -- and its millions of readers -- to build a new model for high-quality reporting."

According to Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed's next big hire, Doree Shafrir, was "ahead of her time writing stories with the emotional intelligence and social impact that has now become the currency of the social web."

Ms. Shafrir told AdWeek, it was partly the opportunity to "be a part in the growth of the social web” that convinced her to leave Rolling Stone.

At Rolling Stone, Michael Hastings got the commander of U.S. operations in Afghanistan fired. But at BuzzFeed, where he was recently hired as the Obama  campaign correspondent, he'll be at the reportorial avant-garde.

"Social publishing is the future of journalism, or at least huge part of its future," Mr. Hastings said, "By joining BuzzFeed, I'll be at the front and center of that world."

Kate Notopoulos risked Gawker mockery to preach the company gospel. "I believe that Buzzfeed really does 'get' the social web, and I'm excited to add to what they already do best," she told Gawker. "PLEASE DON'T MAKE FUN OF ME FOR SAYING THAT."

Perhaps such coherent messaging is a result of another recent hire. NBC News communications coordinator Ashley McCollum was recently made BuzzFeed's press manager. As Mr. Smith told Politico , Ms. McCollum "has deep roots in television at a great network, but she's also fluent and experienced in the social media where BuzzFeed lives."

Have BuzzFeed's hiring announcements forged an association between the words "BuzzFeed" and "social" in your brain? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

"Social publishing is the future of journalism, or at least huge part of its future. By joining BuzzFeed, I'll be at the front and center of that world," Mr. Hastings said in the announcement. "It will give me the chance to be part of a media organization that's breaking new journalistic ground, finding innovative and fresh ways to report the story."

"Then there’s the story itself: President Barack Obama’s fight to remain our president. Assuming we don’t bomb Iran in the next couple of days, the campaign for president is going to be the biggest story of the year," he added. "I can’t wait to buy my tickets to O’Hare." He starts April 2.

Mr. Hastings is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he published "The Runaway General" in 2010 (after shopping it to GQ).  The frank portrayal of the U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, then leading NATO's presence in Afghanistan, won Mr. Hastings the Polk Award and got Mr. McChrystal fired. The piece was extended into a book about counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, The Operators, published by Blue Rider earlier this year (after Little, Brown rejected it). Mr. Hastings has written about war and politics for Newsweek and GQ, among others, and is the author of I Lost My Love in Baghdad, about the death of his fiancee Andi Parhamovich in 2007.

"Michael Hastings is one of the great original reporters of his generation, and his Rolling Stone article ‘The Runaway General’ reflected his total fearlessness," BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said in the announcement. " We're thrilled to add him to a web native political team that's intensely focused on breaking news and on original, revelatory reporting.”

Mr. Hastings's new book.

"Two years ago, Michael showed up on our doorstep," said Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates of his star writer Michael Hastings. The viability of the profile Mr. Hastings had pitched, Mr. Bates said speaking in retrospect, "really depends on what kind of access you can get."The audience erupted in laughter.

A crowd was gathered at the Half King Bar to celebrate the release of Mr. Hastings’s new book, The Operators, a document of the American war in Afghanistan built in part upon Mr. Hastings’s incendiary, excessively accessed profile of General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone—one that led to the general’s resignation.

After a secondary introduction by David Rosenthal, publisher of Penguin imprint Blue Rider Press (the publisher that snapped up Mr. Hastings’s manuscript after Little, Brown had abandoned it), Mr. Hastings took the floor. "I can hear, from 400 miles away, the expletives going through Eric’s head when I file my copy!" said Mr. Hastings, by way of thanks. He mentioned, a few times, the catchphrase "hashtag-humblebrag," and incited his audience to follow him on Twitter, before reading a brief excerpt from his book.

Upon mention of one unflatteringly portrayed soldier, Mr. Hastings interrupted his own work to note, "He also gave me the one-star review on Amazon, probably." (Mr. Hastings has nothing about which to worry: he was featured at number 20 on the Jan. 29 extended hardcover best-sellers list in the Times Book Review.) Reading an digression about a particular soldier, Mr. Hastings referred to his Rolling Stone coup: "The story was so fucking good we didn’t need that."

"It needed some editing, shall we say, but the bone structure was good," said Mr. Rosenthal. "I want him to do another book—he’ll be a star for years to come."

But how can Mr. Hastings get access like that again? "I have a profile coming out of an up-and-coming radio star," he told The Observer outside his reading. "It’s always challenging to get stories that no one else has, but if you look at my stories for Rolling Stone over the past couple years, we break news every time."

As for Little, Brown’s loss, Mr. Hastings began: "They lost their nerve." In the midst of describing the challenges fending off Obama administration challenges to the book’s facts, he spotted a familiar face: "I think that’s Sebastian."

It was, indeed, war correspondent and Half King co-owner

Sebastian Junger, wandering around the base of the High Line on his cell phone. After a bit more of our questioning of Mr. Hastings, Mr. Junger had hung up, and was thanked for his attendance at the reading."I was outside talking to a friend. But, it was good?" asked Mr. Junger.

It was, said Mr. Hastings.

"You got a book coming out?" said Mr. Junger.

Mr. Hastings offered to send him a copy.

Rolling Stone

Mr. Hastings' book is based on his Rolling Stone article "The Runaway General," which provoked President Obama into firing General Stanley McChrystal. In July, a spokesperson for Little, Brown announced that its "publication plans have been cancelled due to editorial differences." [Publishers Marketplace]

Madoff.

Bernie Madoff's prospective daughter-in-law is listed as co-author of a book that has been marketed anonymously to book sellers, leading The New York Times to speculate that the amusingly mysterious book is about him.

MobyLives wonders why Michael Hastings' book was canceled by Little, Brown. They ask some questions: "Why would a publisher spend so much money on a book only to axe it so close to pub? Was Little, Brown worried they may have their own Operation Dark Heart on their hands? More importantly, might the Pentagon be giving them a reason to be worried?" They conclude with no answers: "All good questions for some intrepid reporter to take up…" Indeed.

The Guardian reports that former New of the World employees might end up working at HarperCollins -- or in Siberia.

The Los Angeles Times lays off all its freelance book critics, which Publisher's Weekly called "a move as significant for its breadth as its implications for the future of book coverage." The writing might have been on the wall for that one, but we always knew Los Angelenos were illiterate anyway.

Hastings.

The New York Post is reporting that Little, Brown has canceled Michael Hastings' still-untitled book, described in Publishers Marketplace as "'an unprecedented behind-the-scenes account of America's longest war,' with an unfiltered look at the war, and the soldiers, diplomats and politicians who are waging it."

Little, Brown signed it up after Mr. Hastings' 2010 Rolling Stone article about General Stanley McChrystal. After the article came out President Obama fired Gen. McChrystal and Mr. Hastings got a six-figure advance. Now, according to the Post, Andrew Wylie, who is Mr. Hastings's agent, has started shopping around the manuscript again to editors.

At the very least, this explains why Michael Hastings and Elise Jordan's entry on our Media Power Couples List saw an otherwise inexplicable boost in traffic yesterday.

"We already had another writer trying to get McCrystal, and couldn't assign both stories," GQ editor Jim Nelson wrote in an email to the Media Mob. The June issue of GQ ran with a cover story about model Miranda Kerr.

"He didn't have the piece when we turned it in. He had an idea. He didn't have McChrystal," a spokeswoman for the magazine told us over the phone. "He had the idea of doing the piece, so we turned it down without having an interview with McChrystal."

But the idea was picked up by Rolling Stone and Mr. Hastings ultimately got extensive access to the general and his staff. "I didn't think I was going to get any access at all," Mr. Hastings told Newsweek, where he is also a contributor. "It's one of those strange journalistic twists. They said yes, come on over to Paris to spend a couple days with us."

The story was a huge success for Rolling Stone online, bringing 2.2 million unique visitors in the first two days. On average, Rolling Stone attracts 1.6 million uniques montly. A spokeswoman for Rolling Stone said that newsstand circulation for the June 22 issue is not yet available becuase the issue is still on newsstands. The story has attracted 8 million page views to date

"Yeah, it still hurts," Mr. Nelson wrote in an email. "But we're really happy for Mike," he added. "Not so happy for McCrystal."

zturner@observer.com

From Little, Brown's release:

Little, Brown Publisher Michael Pietsch says, "In his brilliant article Michael Hastings has already given us the clearest of insights into the disaster of America's war in Afghanistan. He is a writer of extraordinary talent and his book will take us deeper and further into the war and its major architects, at a time when we need that clarity desperately."

Hasting's previous book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, recounted the death of his aid worker girlfriend in Iraq.

To give Brooks the benefit of the doubt, his Times column today seems to be an exercise in contrarianism, exploring the possibility that McChrystal didn't really do anything wrong. "Washington floats on a river of aspersion," he reasons. To be close to a public official means that you endure a good amount of "kvetching" from them, and reporters are under no obligation to publish this venting but for the fact that the modern media is obsessed with spats and inside baseball.

It's an interesting idea, but then he goes on to attack Michael Hastings, the reporter who wrote the McChrystal piece, stopping just short of calling him an amateur.

...this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

The two obvious problems with this are that McChrystal's comments weren't the "center" of the profile and moreover McChrystal wasn't hanging out with a reporter from The Washington Post or Roll Call. This was Rolling Stone, the magazine of Hunter Thompson and, more recently, Matt Taibbi. Mightn't he have guessed they'd latch on to something controversial?

Hastings lashed back at Brooks on his Twitter, summarizing the column thusly:

david brooks to young reporters: don't report what you see or hear, or you might upset the powerful.

In any event: How did we get here? Or, rather, how did Michael Hastings get here? Here is a recap from the ten stories today that discussed how this story came together.

Rolling Stone editors assigned the story to freelancer Michael Hastings before they even knew for sure they would have access to Mr. McChrystal.

After that, Mr. Hastings got incredibly lucky. He met Mr. McChrystal in Paris just as the ash from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano was putting a stop to all air travel in Europe. On the phone from Kandahar today, Michael Hastings said that he did the bulk of his reporting for the piece between April 15 and May 15, including one week at the Ritz-Carlton in Berlin. During this time, little of what Mr. McChrystal said was off the record.

For the last month, the story has been with editors at the Rolling Stone. But somehow, the magazine missed the chance to break the story this morning, after Politico and other sites posted pdfs of the piece that were circulated to reporters and bloggers by the magazine's publicity department. 

Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates appeared on Morning Joe to discuss the piece today. Politico heard Mr. Bates say that Mr. McChrystal had been read the entire story before it went to press and approved of all of his quotations.

The magazine's managing editor Will Dana cleared up Mr. Bates' remarkes on television, insisting that the piece had been thoroughly fact-checked. Mr. McChrystal was never allowed to retract quotes or even hear them verbatim before the piece was published.

Mr. McChrystal's PR man Duncan Boothby resigned or, rather, he was asked to resign. This was inevitable.

And Mr. McChrystal is heading to Washington tomorrow morning to meet with Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. to explain himself or at least apologize again. Will he bring his custom four-star nunchucks?