Earlier this month, Colby Hall, founding editor of Mediaite and author of its One Sheet newsletter, celebrated independent media journalist Lachlan Cartwright. In the newsletter—which aims to round up and summarize reporting from other subscription outlets—Hall awarded Cartwright “Newsletter of the Day” for supposedly reporting on how Status lost a scoop about Jeff Shell negotiating his exit from Paramount.

There was just one problem: Cartwright never reported any such thing. “We’ve barely won a chook raffle here at Breaker so it was a surprise to us that we won newsletter of the week for something we did not write," Cartwright told Status on Tuesday.

The serious error was one of more than a half-dozen instances that Status identified in which Hall appeared to invent stories out of thin air, fabricate quotes, or misattribute reporting to the wrong person or outlet. In one case, Hall appeared to plagiarize a passage from Status, only making light tweaks to the copy and passing the writing off as his own.

When asked for comment on Tuesday, Joe DePaolo, Mediaite's top editor, said that Hall had been suspended, pending further review of his work.

"Thank you for bringing these errors to our attention," DePaolo told Status. "We presented your findings to Colby Hall who insists the errors were purely a result of sloppiness in how he aggregated and categorized information, not from the use of A.I. Regardless, it is completely unacceptable and Colby has been suspended from Mediaite pending further investigation."

***

Mediaite founder Dan Abrams announced in late January that the outlet—which boasts an influential readership, largely made up of television news figures who obsessively check the website each day to see if they have been featured on it—was launching its One Sheet newsletter, by way of a piece in The New York Times. Abrams, the proprietor of other enterprises and ABC News’ chief legal analyst, told The Times that there are now too many subscription newsletters and people are “overwhelmed.”

Abrams pitched his newsletter, which costs $8/month or $80/year, as a one-stop destination where the outlet would aggregate the industry’s scoops and juicy nuggets. It was effectively marketed as a bundle for readers wary of paying for multiple media newsletters—an approach that raised ethical questions from the outset. Indeed, The Times even wondered in the piece, “Many of the Substack writers cited by One Sheet also charge for access to their work. Will One Sheet starve these journalists of revenue?”

In any event, the newsletter quickly ran into serious issues. Hall—who was tapped as its lead writer while continuing his other duties at Mediaite, including a regular column and hosting its “Press Club” podcast—began drawing attention in media circles for egregious errors and writing that bore an eerie resemblance to ChatGPT.