Blue Rider Press president and publisher David Rosenthal called the death of journalist and author Michael Hastings in a traffic accident Tuesday a heartbreaking event that “cuts short a life dedicated to speaking truth to power.” Hastings rose to fame for a Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal that resulted in the top-ranking official's resignation. (Hastings reported on the general's highly critical take of the Obama administration.) The article was later expanded into the Blue Rider book, The Operators.

Blue Rider also published Hastings’s Panic 2012. Hastings, Rosenthal said, “believed that journalists must be more than bystanders; he was a truthteller, a charming provocateur and a relentless seeker of decency in a nasty world.”