Stepping Away

After 15 years as Founding Editor of Mediaite, I’m stepping away from the site I helped launch, and that has been my obsession for well over a decade. The decision follows the editorial errors in the One Sheet newsletter that surfaced in April. I addressed those mistakes on the record at the time, and I stand by what I said then.

These were honest mistakes. There was no excuse for them; the responsibility was mine, and the only credible response was to own it. Does intention matter in this sort of situation? I suspect some will show me grace, and many won’t. I get that. Journalism requires discipline, and in this case, I fell short.

I’ve spent 15 years building a reputation I’m proud of, and that’s something I have to earn back, not something I can ask for. That work begins today.

What I didn’t expect, when the suspension started in April, was that the past month would turn out to be one of the most clarifying experiences of my professional life.

Like a lot of people who work in political media, I’ve spent the better part of two decades on what has come to feel like a treadmill, running hard all the time without ever quite getting in better shape. The news cycle never slows down. The takes pile up, the analysis compounds, and you start to mistake velocity for value. Stepping off that treadmill, even involuntarily, was the first time in years I’d had real space to ask whether all the running was actually getting me anywhere.

It also gave my brain a chance to do something it hadn’t done in a long while: rest. I read two novels in the past month, the kind that ask you to sit with a sentence before moving on. I can’t remember the last time I read a novel that wasn’t research for a column, and honestly, I think the answer is sometime before Twitter, which probably tells you everything you need to know.

I’m not pretending suspension is a wellness program. The past month or so was about as dark as anything I’ve gone through professionally. It’s not something I’d wish on my worst enemies, including Mark Levin. My beloved Arsenal winning the Premier League and the Knicks’ playoff run served as glorious distractions. But the unexpected gift of being forced to stop was the realization that I’d been running on fumes for longer than I wanted to admit, and that some of what I thought was professional rigor was actually just exhaustion dressed up as urgency.

So what comes next? I’ll keep writing about media, including the industry, the politics, the narrative wars, and the strange and accelerating relationship between technology and trust. The writing will live on Substack at colbyhall.com going forward.

I’m also returning to the consulting work that I’ve long done on the side, and making it more formal this time under my shingle aught.com (a URL I’ve owned for 30 years and written about here at Mediaite.)

As a veteran TV producer and writer/editor, I’ve been fortunate to work with many great clients over the years. For years, I’ve informally advised friends and colleagues across media on how to navigate a fragmenting industry, and the conversations I’ve had recently suggest there’s a real appetite for that kind of help right now, particularly around narrative strategy and the short-form video pivot that pretty much every newsroom is trying to figure out. I’m looking forward to doing more of that work in the months ahead.

To Dan Abrams, who has been a good friend and a partner through 15+ years of building this thing together, thank you. To the team at Mediaite, past and present, you are some of the smartest, fastest, most relentless people I’ve ever worked with, and I’ll be reading you. To the readers who have stuck around, I’m grateful, and I’m not going anywhere, just somewhere else.

Mediaite will keep punching above its weight. I’ll keep writing, advising, and looking for what’s next.

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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