The News
A series of mishaps at the media newsletter One Sheet, including misattributed information and made-up quotes, has raised questions about whether its use of AI to aggregate news is leading to hallucinations — and has led to the author’s suspension.
The media news site Mediaite built One Sheet to aggregate the growing list of media newsletters. For $8 a month, the newsletter adds commentary from author Colby Hall and promises cost savings for media super-users, who may be spending around $15 a month per subscription for media newsletters from Puck, Status, Breaker, and others.
But in the four months since its launch, Mediaite’s newsletter has grown increasingly error-prone, and has included a number of fake quotes and information attributed to different outlets and authors.
In an email to Semafor, Hall told Semafor that while he uses AI in a “limited way,” all “written ideas, angles, summaries, takes, and editorial judgments are mine.” He said the mistakes were the result of problems with his production process. Hall said he has a spreadsheet populated with dozens of newsletters, organizing the sheet with “columns for source, writer, topic, angle, summary, and takeaway.” He said his recent errors “originated in the data entry process.”
“Like many editors, I use AI in a limited way as part of my editorial workflow — primarily as a copy and organizational aid,” he said.
“Unfortunately, we’ve made mistakes that are easy to jump on. I’m committed to ensuring that mistakes like this don’t happen in the future, but if they do, we will honor those with corrections,” he said.
On Monday, media company Status said One Sheet “appeared to outright fabricate a quote and attribute it to our very own Jon Passantino, putting us on heavy blast on its website and newsletter for something we never did.” In response, Mediaite added a correction, citing “mistaken attribution.”
This was the second time Mediaite had misquoted Status: In February, Status said Mediaite falsely attributed quotes to the newsletter, claiming founder Oliver Darcy had written a column on US President Donald Trump posting a photo of the Obamas as apes (Mediaite apologized at the time and appended a correction to its piece).
Hall told Semafor that the reason Monday’s newsletter misattributed a quote was that he “entered my own misinterpretation into my sourcing notes as if it reflected what Status had actually published. I guess you could call that confirmation bias, but I ended up constructing a drama that wasn’t there.”
CNN has also experienced frustrating attribution issues. In Monday’s edition of One Sheet, Mediaite mixed up CNN media writer Brian Stelter’s commentary on Athletic reporter Dianna Russini with recent reporting about California Rep. Eric Swalwell.
“Stelter frames the Russini story as a case study in the difference between “‘internet whispers and investigative reports,’” One Sheet wrote.
But Stelter’s comments about the difference between “internet whispers and investigative reports” were in reference to recent reporting on Swalwell, not Russini. While Stelter mentioned the Athletic’s internal investigation of Russini in his Sunday edition, he made no comparison between the two stories.
Earlier this year, One Sheet also misattributed quotes from Reliable Sources, Press Gazette, and NeimanLab.
“Politico’s Dasha Burns noted the tactical shift on ‘Fox & Friends’ Monday morning: Brian Kilmeade ‘repeatedly called for Homan to be sent to Minneapolis throughout the course of the show. [Border czar Tom] Homan was deployed 20 minutes later.’ CNN’s Brian Stelter added that Maria Bartiromo’s weekend criticism was key to Trump’s thinking…”
The entire chain was misattributed. It was CNN’s Brian Stelter that noted Kilmeade’s calls for Homan to be sent to Minneapolis, while the Washington Post noted Bartiromo’s criticism was key to Trump’s thinking (Stelter did not mention Bartiromo in the reporting linked by Mediaite).
In a January issue of the newsletter, Mediaite mistakenly attributed a statistic from Press Gazette to Niemanlab. The piece also seemed to suggest that a quote from the News/Media Alliance was in the NiemanLab piece, though the quote did not appear in the piece itself. When NiemanLab complained about the story, the publication chalked up the errors to essentially, “a case of the Mondays.”
The View From Mediaite
In an email to Semafor, Hall said there was “no excuse for the mistakes that have happened,” but emphasized the errors were the result of the laborious process that includes “a lot of data to sift through and present in a synthesized and coherent manner.”
“I’m proud of the product and know it provides value and honors the great work of many reporters I respect and admire. I understand it’s a new product and a news media product so mistakes will be noted and scrutinized,” he said.
After Semafor published this report Tuesday afternoon, Mediaite editor-in-chief Joe DePaolo sent the following statement:
“We presented the 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 AI. Regardless, it is completely unacceptable and Colby has been suspended from Mediaite pending further investigation.”