"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.

The story was a huge success, a comeback of sorts, for Rolling Stone, bringing extraordinary traffic to the magazine's website — 2.2 unique visitors in two days last week, compared to the site's monthly average of 1.6 million, so said Wenner Media — and moving five times as many copies off the newsstand as an average month (and bringing in some opinions from one Graydon Carter!).

Even so, the magazine was outflanked by competitors who (briefly) siphoned off traffic by publishing the story before Rolling Stone had a chance to. David Carr wrote about the theft in The New York Times today:

It was a clear violation of copyright and professional practice, and it amounted to taking money out of a competitor’s pocket. What crafty guerrilla site or bottom-feeder would do such a thing?

Turns out it was Time.com and Politico, both well-financed, reputable news media organizations, that blithely stepped over the line and took what was not theirs.

It's almost surprising to see established companies operating under the assumption of "better to ask forgiveness than permission," but the scrappiness is not surprising at all. A Time Inc. spokesman said CEO Anne Moore thought of it as an "honest mistake." Sorry (but not really) that we stole all of your traffic.

Other interesting stories to come out over the weekend from The Washington Post: Mr. McChrystal and reporter Michael Hastings were not on the same page about what was on the record and what was not, and the fact-checking for the piece skirted some of the tougher questions.

From now on, nobody trust anybody else!

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?

McChrystal came from a distinguished military family and, like John McCain before him, rebelled against his legacy in college. Cited for drinking and partying, he was relatively undistinguished academically though, according to the article, his fiction would "eerily foreshadow many of the issues he would confront in his career."

In one tale, a fictional officer complains about the difficulty of training foreign troops to fight; in another a 19-year-old soldier kills a boy he mistakes for a terrorist. In "Brinkman's Note," a piece of suspense fiction, the unnamed narrator appears to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the assassin, and he's able to infiltrate the White House: "The President strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman's failure, I had succeeded."

Hemingway would be proud. So would Hinckley, probably.