Michael Hastings will cover President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign for post-meme social news site BuzzFeed (BZFD), the company announced today.
“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.”
