Discussion on a topic familiar to him, journalism. The panelists are john avhon, editorinchief of the daily beast, marisa buchanan, dave cullen, a freelance journalist, matthew far welshing writer for Rolling Stone, alex gelber, citizen nyu journalism school, lou san reid, eric bates, editor at first look, the intercept, ruby cramer, correspondent for buzzfeed, will dana, jack grey, senior producer at cnn, anderson coopers 360, and jeremy. Here to act as the emcee is ben smith who was hastings last employer and editorinchief at buzzfeed. Since joining the company in january 2012, ben has built a newsroom of over 150 appropriators and editors, led expansion of over 20 content articles and built a team across the world. He has run for the wall street journal written for the wall street journal, the los angeles times, slate, the New York Post and the new republic. Ben will join us on stage in just a moment, but first, a short audio clip from the book. Introduction. Why i write. Finish my name is michael m. Hastings, and and im in my 20s. Im sitting in a studio apartment on the Lower East Side in manhattan, second floor overlooking or chard and bloomington. Theres snow dropping by the streetlights. Its three a. M. , and i just got off work. My magazine has a policy; a little item in the 57page Human Resources manual called the outside activities clause. It prevents employees from publishing journalism without the magazines permission. That could apply to writing books like this one, so i want to say right now this is fiction. Its all made up. This book is a story about the media elite. Maybe youre interested in that world. I have the ccs and the bcc and the replay all, three years worth, from 2002 to 2005, time and place specific, a very recognizable new york at least for now. I do have themes, too, but in a way though its not my love, and i cant say i understand it too well. Not murder, not in the whodunit sense. No ghosts or supernatural horrors or serial killers. Sex. Yes, i have a bunch of sex scenes. Theres war in the backdrop looming and distant and not real for most of these characters. Myself included. Maybe im talking genres and maybe the genre is corporate betrayal. Including the big decision that the entire media world is so interested in who and what is left standing. Itll take me about 300 pages, approximately 85,000 words, to get to that. By turning the page, you are one step closer to the truth. Thank you. Thank you guys all for coming. Im ben smith. Very few reporters have kind of real fans of their own, i think, like most people read us for what were writing about. And michael, i mean, i dont know, the turnout here shows as well as having people who really loved him, had people who recognized and followed his voice and byline. You know, which is kind of a very unusual and amazing thing. He was one of the great journalists of our generation, no doubt. Fearless and had a nose for conflict and really had figured out how to make people care and make Americans Care about the issues of power and life and death that the kind of cliches americans wont read about. He covered the great he had this idea that there were three Great American beats. Eric probably told him this. He, and one was politics, and one was hollywood, and he had written very powerfully about both of those, but i think his most powerful work was about war and peace including an exeau say in Rolling Stone of how the military leadership in afghanistan saw the civilian leadership that changed the course of the involvement in that war. He also had a novel in his desk drawer to the surprise of his friends, it was about the media, but it was also about the same themes of power and life and death. It is among other things very good. Even the New York Times had something nice to say about it today. There are and that and thats what were here to celebrate. First were going to see a video monodamage about michael. Montage. In my internship at newsweek, basically, i was working for free for a i few months. [inaudible] yeah, exactly. [inaudible conversations] you know, there was a heat wave that summer, my apartment had aircondition, so i was [inaudible] hired me and then, you know, after i looked back at it a couple of weeks later, and thats when i started doing the overseas. [inaudible] say your name and unit. Say hi to everyone. Okay. And then when you hope youre going to be home. All right. What do you think of baghdad . Its baghdad. Theres nothing you can really say about baghdad. Glad were here doing what we were supposed to be doing. Hey, whats up, everybody . Specialist dan gurks erin stationed in bag cad, iraq. 24 years old. Wow cut [laughter] im 26. I gotta tell ya, its been awesome. Its been fucking sweet. Words cant describe the satisfaction you get of busting in the home of an iraqi, taking away their only means of expending themselves and giving them a 2 lock while insurgents roam the streets preying on them. Details about the death squad was the stuff that i was most interested in never actually made it to the magazine. When i decided to leave newsweek, one of the things i wanted to do was capture all those details, and one of the first big stories i did was for gq where i went out to this outpost on the border of pakistan and afghanistan with this group of 20 guys and talked about people who never, no one ever listens to the average soldier, the private and the specialist. He lives his life not being listened to. Im sitting atop a fighting position at a border checkpoint along the afghan pakistan border. Be were here with a Field Artillery unit. They havent been out here in a while. So the idea behind the story general mccristal had was no ones ever really hung out with these to be ranking guys and sort of told it like it was with them. You know, so thats what my sort of thinking you know, should he have been fired . That was president obamas decision. I was awakened about i think it was two this the morning, and i in the morning, and i was told there was a problem, that the roming stone article was about to come out, and it was bad. As difficult as it is to lose general mccristal, i believe it is the mcchrystal i believe it is the right thing. The conduct recently presented in the published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general. One of the sort of interesting aspects to the story, and you touched upon it in your question, in the questioning period here. Wiz the only one disturb i was the only one who asked should you have written the story. And that was a response that a number of other journalists had as well. And to he, what it illuminated was the sort of extremely cozy relationship that many in my profession have established with very powerful figures and how much they cherish that relationship and the idea that anyone could threaten that, you know, causes great, great concern. So the sort of vicious kind of attacks i always get are from my other journalists. My colleagues. Is this going to prompt the military in general, the commanders in afghanistan in particular to be more wary of journalist this is. Of course. Because what you see is not what you get. Youve got someone whos making friends with you, pretending to be sympathetic, pretending to be something that theyre not. When you start an article with general mcchrystal making obscene gestures if general mcchrystal was not plausible person, no one would have been on cnn saying, hey, wait, was that off the record . But i think what ive tried to demonstrate without seeming like too much of a, you know, jerk, is that you can do this kind of reporting. If youre a young reporter out there, you can do this kind of reporting. You can be uncompromising and hardhitting and fair and accurate and honest, and you can still people will pick up the form be again. The Pakistani Border has been rife with tensions between u. S. And taliban fight beers. The u. S. Has launched a number of airstrikes across the border, and taliban fighters have been shooting rockets and missiles rockets and missiles, have been shooting okay. Im going to call this a day. [applause] i think were going to start with a number of us sharing some personal remarks about michael. I thought i would start. And i guess i couldnt handle getting too personal, so i was, i was looking back at some of our earlier emails or first emails because you can always search back, and i just remembered his first when we were talking, like, he had this real, i dont know what he was doing. It was a totally insane thing to do, we were really only known for imagine pictures at the time. And he had, like, this sort of sense because be he was very he was obsessed with media, he had this sense that we were doing something unique hot exciting which was his sort of thing. And so, but he mailed me very early on, quote i need a clause somewhere in the contract that says if buzzfeed fires me for writing something controversial or offensive, there will have to be some sort of severance payment. I have a demonstrated ability to piss people off, and i need assurance that buzzfeed has my back 100 , which we offered. And that was michael. He had incredible instinct for conflict. And also, surprisingly, this incredible delight in the internet, in the media, in what people around him were doing. I remember very early on i was looking at a fairly awkward photograph of a police horse dog something inappropriate doing something inappropriate, and michael totally entranced by this. And this book, which really you should get and realize, he was such an astute observer of everything that was going on around him all the time. When he was this young newsweek reporter of the supposed to be doing an amazing job of reporting on iraq, he was also reporting on newsweek and on the american media, and this really pretty bad moment for the american media. So buy the book, and i think i will hand this over to whoever eileen tells me is next. To eric. [inaudible] just go right around the stage. There you go. Sit here . Thats fine. This is eric bates who was michaels great editor at Rolling Stone. Yeah. One of the things that always impressed me about michael is lots of reporters want to tell the truth, and they want to get the story, but theres still all kinds of considerations that you generally factor into your work about what the publication needs or how its going to appear or what its going to do to your sources, and i think its pretty clear that michael did the job. He went places so that we could be there. He didnt believe that there was any he turned off his internal sensor, any internal sensor that he had often to his own detriment. Because thats what he believed the job was about. And i think this struck him most be strongly when he won the polk award for the mcchrystal story. And i was sitting at a table with him right in front of the stage. We were also sitting at the same table with the head of the university that gives the polk award, and the presenter got up to give the award, and for some reason they had selected a presenter who was not a very big fan of michaels [laughter] and who proceeded to present the award in such a way that made it clear that this person thought that michael really didnt deserve the award, that he had just kind of been in the right place at the right time and that perhaps he had gotten this story by some less than honorable means. At which point someone in the room shouted out very loudly, bullshit, and it was michael. [laughter] and i just sort of edged away from him a little bit, pretended like i didnt know him. [laughter] but that was michael. Even at his own awards ceremony, he would yell bullshit from the audience, and i think thats the same spirit he brought to his work. This is ruin key cram ruby cramer who michael found on reddit. I think i went and found him. Yeah, i didnt know michael for that long, but as soon as we met, he just sort of somehow by some grace took me under his wing a little bit. I reached out to him very randomly, basically, like the modern version of a cold call which is i made a reddit account and kind of, like, asked a question on his reddit ama which was are you in need or want of a parttime researcher . At the time, i was working fulltime at cbs, but i wanted to be Michael Hastings research assistant. I dont think ben at the time had budgeted anything for a researcher, but he, i think, you know, he writes in the book which is wonderful about a time when he was in his 20s, and he sort of was, he found me when i was or i found him when i was in my 20s, and i think what a lot of people dont know about michael is he was incredibly sort of fostering of young journalists. Not just me, so many people at buzzfeed, so many people who met him. He was very caring about whether or not we felt like that we were sort of somehow able to grow. I remember when he found out i hadnt been to an Obama Campaign event yet, he said, okay, were going to go on saturday, and the Campaign Event was in vermont. So we drove the six hours to vermont so that i could to to a campaign. That was how michael was with young reporters. And again, i think thats something people dont really know about him but was a huge part of his life. And what [inaudible] the executive editor at Rolling Stone. Actually, managing editor. Michael is dead for a year this month, so the with the resurfacing of the Bowe Bergdahl article, and i think thats such a great testament to michael and his instincts. You know, just his ability to get be on the story. I mean be, he came and met with eric and i right before the mcchrystal thing, and he kind of bowled us over. When he walked out of the room, we were like, hell never be able to do that. [laughter] you get the phone call two days later saying, oh, you know, they dont want to give me access, sorry. And be, like, mike called back three days later and said im flying out to afghanistan on monday. And that was, you know, i think, him. He just vibrate with the the sense of the story, and every time he came to see you, he had a million ideas and, you know, whatever drama and conflict was there, you know, he was just zoning in on it, you know . Youd walk out of a meeting, and thered be four things youd want him to do next, and the bigger problem was deciding what the thing to do was not how are we going to get this guy a story. It was a great loss for us personally and professionally, you know . The guy, like more than i think of he just sort of emerged fully formed, you know . I think you get that sense reading the book. Even at age 22 its like this kid from vermont showing up and savvy and smarter than anyone in the room whos been there for 20 years. So, you know, he was a special guy, and its just great that were here to celebrate him. Elliot . Im actually closing, so jer hawaii scale. Jeremy scale. Yeah, i was with michael about a week before he died, and it was sort of funny how i ended up hanging out with him that night. I had seen him maybe a month earlier, and we watched, we went to a bar in los angeles, and we watched Floyd Mayweather fight. Michael was a huge boxing fan. You know, both of us could hold our liquor, and we reached the end of the night, and i think we had gone through two and a half bottles of patron dekeel ya, and there was dekeel ya, and there was an argument over who was going to pay that almost actually came to blows. Michael was going to slug me. Then i saw him at a different time, and be he was completely different. I mean, it was really interesting because i had this sense the last time i saw michael that he had, like, somehow found be a new lease on life, and he was showing he pictures of a property in vermont and talking about the stories that he was working on, and it was incredible. He told me that he had this new bead on the nsa stories, and this was just as the snowden revelations were coming out, and he was doing an investigation of john prep man, and he also and it turns out he was right believed that the fbi was conducting an investigation into him or his work. But he seemed very much like he was as driven as ever and was looking forward to the next story, the next beat that he was going to be covering. And, you know, when we got the news that he was killed, that he died, i think all of us were flooded with these memories of michael, and most of the memories that i, that popped into my head were about what an apocket limittic apocket limittic observer he was. Michael didnt give a fuck in the elite correspondents liked him or not. In fact, they took pride in the fact that they didnt like him. He wanted to be the skunk in the room at the party. And i think those are the ones that are the best journalist, the ones that are not concerned about whether they get invited to the Joe Biden Party at the white house. Michael was the guy who would go to that, it was supposed to be off the record, and then he would be talk about how Hillary Clinton is a better shot than chuck todd. And and i remember watching him on all these shows, and ive described being on those shows at times like a boxing match, but it was a boxing match where everyone else was outmatched against michael. Mike all was michael was a great debater, but they were outmatched because michael had the gumption, the stomach, the temerity to ask is the tough questions. And he had tremendous empathy for the people who lived on the other side of the barrel of that gun in u. S. War. Whether it was the victims of drone strikes he did one of the first early stories about the killing of american citizens in drone strikes or it was soldiers who were sent to a totally failed war because they wanted to go to college. And whats funny about the mcchrystal story is that i had a lot of sources within jsoc, and i remember getting a call from one of my sources this is when sources would actually talk to you on the phone, now they wont because of the nsa. And they said, oh, did you hear about this Michael Hastings piece thats going to come out . Yeah, hastings was stuck in this bar with a bunch of jsoc guys, and theyre like, i think its going to be a doozy. Michael was around, a lot of shit was talked about biden and obama, but they were acting like were going to stick it to the white house. Its not like, oh, we were caught off guard, they all knew that michael was a reporter and that he was the kind of reporter that would report everything. So then the story comes out, and, you know, and the lady gaga, i think, was on the cover of that issue of Rolling Stone which was sort of a funny thing. So the story then comes out, and i get a text from a source, and the subject within jsoc who worked for S